OBCL Success by the Numbers

---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!

When you think of the best law schools in the country, what schools come to mind? Yale? Stanford? Harvard? Indeed, these three schools top the U.S. News & World Report’s 2013 law school rankings, followed by Columbia University, the University of Chicago, New York University, UC Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan.

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.

Cal Bar pass rates for February, 2012: http://admissions.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/4/documents/Statistics/FEBRUARY2012STATS.pdf