Law School Transfer Data and Professional Identity Formation
By: Jerry Organ, Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law This blog posting updates my blog postings over the last several years regarding what we know about the transfer market, for example 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020. With the ABA’s posting of the 2024 Standard 509 Reports, we now have more than a decade of detailed transfer data from which to glean insights about the transfer market among law schools, which has been in decline for most of the last decade. This posting also includes a section on transfer “feeder schools” and some reflections on whether and how law schools might be providing opportunities for professional identity formation for their transfer students. Numbers of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers Remain Essentially Flat at the Lowest Levels in the Last Decade As shown in Table 1 below, the number of transfer students received by law schools in 2024 increased slightly from 1162 to 1194, the second smallest number of transfers in the last decade, but as a percentage of first-year students, it remained flat at 3.0%. For the last several years, the transfer market had been […]
