Relationship Quality by Age
At a recent LSSSE webinar, one insightful participant wondered whether the trend younger law students that we outlined in our recent annual report might be related to a corresponding ongoing decline in relationships with administrative staff. In this blog post, we will explore the relationship between law school student age and quality of their relationships with law school faculty and staff.
Law students generally enjoy satisfying relationships with others at their law school. LSSSE respondents are asked to rate their relationships with other students, law school faculty, and law school administrative staff on a 7-point scale. We consider a rating of 5 or higher to be a positive relationship. Typically, law students are most highly satisfied with their relationships with each other, followed by their relationships with faculty, and finally they tend to be least satisfied with relationships with law school staff.
There is much less variability by age in the percentage of students with strong relationships with faculty compared to the percentage of students with strong relationships with staff. In other words, most students have strong relationships with faculty, but certain age groups of students are more likely to have strong relationships with staff than others. The hypothesis about student age and quality of relationships with staff seems to be mostly supported. The oldest students (those over age 40) are most likely to have strong relationships with administrative staff. Students in the 23-30 range are the least likely to have strong relationships with administrative staff, and students in their thirties fall in between. Most age groups have showed a decline in recent years, and it doesn’t appear that any age group has experienced a more precipitous decline than the others. The one notable exception is the youngest group of students—those under the age of 23. These students have been more likely to be satisfied with their relationships with staff in recent years, nearly reaching the same levels as the over 40 group in 2024.
Overall, students are much more likely to have strong relationships with faculty than with administrative staff, which makes sense given that students are likely to work more closely with faculty and see them more often. However, parsing the relationship data by age shows the same general pattern: the oldest students are most likely to have strong relationships, the youngest students are the least likely, and the middle group falls somewhere in between. In this instance, the 22 and under group appears nearly indistinguishable from students in their thirties in recent years.
Age clearly matters at least to some degree when it comes to the quality of student/faculty and student/staff interactions. Older students tend to be satisfied with their relationships compared to younger students. This suggests that law schools might consider how they are facilitating the formation of these relationships and what tweaks might bring younger students into closer, more meaningful relationships with law school faculty and staff.
A Long-Term Look at Relationships with Law School Peers, 2004-2023
A common misconception about law students is that their competition with each other for grades, jobs, and prestige creates a stressful and hostile law school environment. However, this is not the case for most law students who often find opportunities for support and friendship among their peers. Law students share common challenges and goals, and they can benefit from exchanging ideas and resources with each other. Many law schools also foster a culture of collegiality and mutual respect, where students are encouraged to help each other and celebrate each other's achievements. Rather than being a source of stress, peer relationships can be a source of resilience and well-being for law students. In fact, LSSSE data from 2023 show that only 38% of law students experienced quite a bit or very much stress or anxiety because of competition with peers. They are far more likely to be substantially stressed by academic performance (80% of students) and academic workload (79% of students).
Since the 2004 LSSSE inaugural survey, an average of 77% of law students have said that their overall relationships with other students are mostly positive (at least a 4 on a 7-point scale). This number has fluctuated over time, with 81% of students having mostly positive relationships in 2004 and 73% of students feeling similarly in 2023.
If we compare the percentage of students having an overall positive relationship with peers to the all-time LSSSE national average of 77%, we can see that the last several years have had slightly lower levels of peer satisfaction.
Although satisfaction with peer relationships was already on a somewhat downward trajectory before COVID-19, the notable decrease in relationship satisfaction during the 2020-2021 academic year may be largely driven by the decrease in relationship satisfaction among 1L students. In the spring of 2020 (largely before COVID-19 shutdowns started), 80% of 1L students were satisfied with their relationships with their fellow students. In the spring of 2021 after a year of huge disruptions in the law school environment including widespread online learning, only 72% of 1L students felt this way. However, 74% of 3L students were satisfied with their peer relationships in 2020 and again 74% of 3L students felt this way in 2021. Students who were introduced to law school in a time of necessary isolation were understandably somewhat less able to bond with their classmates. Orientation programs, study groups, moot courts, clinics, extracurriculars, and informal gatherings were either canceled, restricted, or moved online. These disruptions may have hindered the ability of 1L students to establish friendships and build rapport. Furthermore, online learning may have decreased the frequency and quality of interactions among students, as well as the sense of belonging and community that stems from being physically present in a shared space. Nevertheless, relationships among law students remained positive overall, showing that even the limitations of pandemic life did not prevent characteristically creative and resilient law students from forging relationships with each other. It will be interesting to examine how law students feel about their relationships with each other in future years now that life has largely returned to the pre-pandemic normal.
The Changing Landscape of Legal Education: Positive Learning Outcomes
Over the past fifteen years, LSSSE has documented dramatic changes in legal education. From 2004 to 2019, the changing landscape of law school was punctuated by increasing diversity among students, rising debt levels, relative consistency in job expectations, and improvements in various learning outcomes. In spite of many challenges, law students nevertheless report relatively constant positive levels of satisfaction with legal education overall. Our 2020 special report The Changing Landscape of Legal Education: A 15-Year LSSSE Retrospective shares longitudinal findings on select metrics as well as demographic differences within variables to catalog how legal education has changed over time. In this blog post, we will share how students have increased their achievement of selected learning outcomes from 2004 to 2019.
According to LSSSE data, law schools contributed to increases in a variety of perceived learning outcomes from 2004 to 2019; collectively, these point toward progress in terms of how students measure their own skills and likely in terms of actual practice-readiness of graduates. In 2004, only 23% of students saw their schools as doing “quite a bit” or “very much” to help them understand people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds; because of steady increases over the next fifteen years, especially between 2009 and 2014, almost half (45%) of students today see their schools as doing “quite a bit” or “very much” to prepare them to interact with racially diverse colleagues and clients.
In addition, schools have increased their emphasis on professional responsibility in the past fifteen years. While even in 2004 a full 43% of students saw their schools as doing “quite a bit” or “very much” to encourage them to develop a personal code of values and ethics, that number has now grown to 58%. Schools were already prioritizing complex problem solving fifteen years ago, and students see institutional support for this skill growing over time as well. While in 2004, 12% of students believed their law schools contributed “very much” to their ability to solve “complex real-world problems,” that percentage has doubled over fifteen years so that now almost a quarter (24%) of students agree. Law schools are also encouraging students to focus on developing career goals and aspirations. In 2004, almost a quarter (23%) of all law students saw their schools doing “very little” to contribute to their developing clearer career goals; by 2019 those statistics dropped to 14%. On the flip side, while only 11% saw their schools doing “very much” in this regard in 2004, that number has risen steadily, reaching 22% in 2014 and remaining there in 2019.
Looking at the past can help prepare us for our future. To learn more, you can read the entire Changing Landscape report here.