---Guest post by OBCL alum Elliot Ko
Emily's note: This week, the Sacramento Business Journal published a story on the Bar success rates of California law schools, showing that OBCL grads were not only competitive with by outperformed grads from some of CA's top-ranked law schools. We asked recent grad (and newly-minted California attorney) Elliot Ko to draft up a post with some more details on these numbers and Oak Brook's Bar pass rates. Thanks, Elliot!
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| Elliot (07B) with classmates during Trial Advocacy |
Recently-released results from
the February 2012 California Bar Examination, however, contain the name of one
law school whose graduates performed comparably to the graduates of these top
tier-law schools---even though it wasn’t even ranked in the U.S. News & World
Report’s latest law school rankings.
The California Bar is generally considered
the most difficult bar examination in the country. It is a grueling ordeal
which covers thirteen subjects, lasts three days, and costs more than $750 just
to take. The stakes are high. The pressure is intense. And the pass rates are
always predictably low. In fact, this past February, the pass rate was just
42.5%. Even among out-of-state attorneys who were allowed to take a shorter
version of the exam because they were already licensed to practice law in
another state, the pass rate was only 45.9%. Little wonder, then, that the list
of lawyers who have failed the California Bar reads like a “Who’s Who” of
famous dignitaries in California. (Current California governor Jerry Brown, for
example, failed the California Bar twice before passing it on his third try.
Former California governor Pete Wilson failed the California Bar three times
before passing it on his fourth try, and current Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
has yet to pass the California Bar after taking it four times.)
If you peruse the results of the February
2012 California Bar Examination, however, you will find the name of one law
school with a surprisingly high pass rate: Oak Brook College of Law. Obviously,
Oak Brook isn’t exactly a household name. But among those law schools who sent at
least five first-time takers to the February 2012 California Bar Examination,
Oak Brook’s 89% first-time pass rate was the second highest in the country—behind
only Western State University College of Law and ahead of every other U.S. law
school that sent more than ten total takers to the February 2012
California Bar Examination, including #7 ranked UC Berkeley (71%), #10 ranked
University of Michigan (80%), #13 ranked Georgetown University (77%), #15 ranked
U.C.L.A (71%), #18 ranked U.S.C. (57%), #26 ranked Arizona State (50%), #29
ranked Fordham University (71%), and #49 ranked Pepperdine University (71%). In
fact, if you add law schools with less
than five first-time takers into the mix, Oak Brook’s first-time pass rate actually
topped that of #2 ranked Stanford Law
School (75%), #20 ranked George Washington University (75%), #26 ranked Boston
University (75%), and #29 ranked U.C.–Davis
(50%). And if you factor in repeat takers, Oak Brook’s 63% overall pass rate is
still good enough to place it in eleventh place in the country.
This isn’t the first time Oak
Brook’s graduates have done well on the California Bar Examination. So what
makes them so successful? Is it Oak Brook’s selective admissions policy? Not
really. In fact, unlike most law schools, Oak Brook doesn’t even weed out
applicants based on their LSAT scores. And it doesn’t even have a
brick-and-mortar campus of its own. Instead, once a year, its students meet at
a rented facility for a school-wide conference. The rest of the year, its
tightly knit student body study on their own, upload their assignments online,
and communicate with each other regularly via phone calls, text messages, and
instant messages. But the differences don’t stop there. For example, Oak Brook’s
student body is largely comprised of young homeschool graduates and thirty- to
fifty-year-old men and women embarking on their second or third careers.
Furthermore, unlike most top-tier law schools that charge anywhere from $40,000
to $50,000 in tuition every year, Oak Brook charges only $4,000 in tuition
every year, with most of its professors receiving the most minimal of salaries
in order to keep the school’s expenses low. And as if all this wasn’t already
enough to make this school unique, Oak Brook is an unabashedly Christian school
whose website states that its mission “is to train individuals who desire to
advance the gospel of Jesus Christ through service as advocates of truth,
counselors of reconciliation, and ministers of justice in the fields of law and
government policy.”
In our status-obsessed society, it’s good to know you
don’t have to have the most money or go to the most prestigious school in order
to have a successful career. What you’re made of, who you live for, and how
hard you are willing to work still matters more than anything else in the world.
My name is Caleb Harlin and I currently reside in Oklahoma. I attended Oak Brook College of Law and graduated cum laude in 2009. Following my graduation, I passed the California bar exam and was sworn in as an attorney in June of 2010. Since that time, I have been actively practicing law in the areas of personal injury, business law, and civil litigation. Due to my desire to practice law in Oklahoma, I have gone back to law school and am currently studying at the Oklahoma City University School of Law with the goal of setting up my own law practice in Oklahoma in the areas of personal injury, business law, civil litigation, and estate planning, with a focus on offering counsel to clients for more than simply legal needs. In the meantime, I do contract research and writing for several law firms of various sizes. I enjoy running and cycling, playing chess, and performing music on the piano and violin. 
