American Bar Association site updates data on law school admissions, tuition and more

Information about admissions and other matters reported by American Bar Association-approved law schools to the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and required to be made public under Standard 509 of the Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools is now publicly available. 

The material is collected by the section, which requires law schools each year to disclose data in 11 categories, covering admissions, tuition and living costs, financial aid, class and faculty demographics, employment outcomes, bar passage and other areas. The data can be easily searched and sorted, allowing for school-by-school comparisons and analysis and should be useful to prospective law students, pre-law advisors, media outlets and others who study and write about legal education.

The spreadsheets, explanatory information and the ABA's database of Standard 509 reports are available at www.abarequireddisclosures.org. Some of this information has been collected and summarized in the News and Announcement listings on the section's website and in its Statistics section.

The council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and its accreditation committee are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the national accrediting agency for programs leading to the J.D. The section’s 14,000 members strive to improve legal education and lawyer licensing by fostering cooperation among legal educators, practitioners and judges through workshops, conferences and publications. The section also studies and makes recommendations for the improvement of the bar admission process, and the section and its governing council operate for accreditation purposes as independent arms of the ABA.