Going Public with Innovation: Comparing Survey Respondents to All Law Schools and Non-Respondents

This is part three of a series discussing and analyzing the results of a survey sent by Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers to 210 U.S. and Canadian law schools to explore innovations in legal education.

As described in an earlier post, Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiated a unique, far-reaching survey of 210 U.S. and Canadian law schools. Now completed, the survey has a 58% response rate. Before presenting the findings in a series of future posts, we face a key prior task – describing the responding schools and seeing how closely they resemble all schools and the non-responding schools. These comparisons are important because they tell us how much confidence we can have in the survey’s findings with regard to patterns and changes in legal education generally. With this in mind we compared schools on a broad array of characteristics: public v. private; part-time v. no part-time (as well as percentage of enrollment part-time for those with such a program);  percent Caucasian enrollment; AALS membership; geographic location; faculty ratio; total enrollment; acceptance rate; median LSAT score; tuition; and rank (based on U.S. News data).  Using these characteristics and commonly accepted statistical tests, the responding schools prove to be quite similar to all schools and no significant differences between the responding and non-responding schools appear.

Read more and view detailed comparisons by downloading the full report.