Don’t Baby Law School Applicants

ByNoah Feldman, Bloomberg View

Should law schools admit students who are statistically uncertain to pass the bar on the basis of their standardized test scores? A growing conventional wisdom says no. The worry is that such students will build up large amounts of debt that they won’t be able to pay back if they don’t become lawyers.

This view assumes that it’s up to the law schools to make the threshold decision paternalistically, “saving” naive college graduates from pursuing the dream of becoming lawyers when there’s no guarantee that they’ll succeed. It treats standardized test scores as destiny ...