Major Policy Shift: ABA May Bless Online Law Schools

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Nov 20 (Reuters) – The American Bar Association’s legal education arm is considering extending accreditation to fully online schools, marking a major shift from its longstanding prioritization of in-person teaching.

The ’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar voted Friday to gather public comments on proposed changes to its standards that would enable new and existing schools with no physical campus to apply for accreditation.Only schools with brick-and-mortar locations are currently eligible for ABA accreditation. The ABA has allowed a growing number of those schools to offer fully or mostly online Juris Doctor programs alongside their residential ones, but fully online schools have remained ineligible to apply for the ABA’s stamp of approval.

Daniel Thies, chairperson of the ABA Council’s Strategic Review Committee, on Friday called the proposal to accredit online schools a “significant change” that could help lower the cost of a legal education. He noted that online programs offered by ABA-accredited schools generally charge the same tuition for online and residential students.

“Likely, that’s because they’re all offered by brick-and-mortar schools that have all the same expenses associated with brick-and-mortar schools,” Thies said.

accreditation would be a boon for the small cohort of existing online schools because their graduates would be able to sit for the bar exam in any state. Currently only California offers the bar for graduates of non-ABA accredited schools.

Thies suggested that some traditional schools may object to the change for fear of added competition. But longstanding perceptions that distance education is lower quality than in-person teaching have diminished significantly following the rapid shift to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ABA council members said Friday.

Purdue Global Law School is the oldest online school — it was founded in 1998 as the Concord Law School before its acquisition by Purdue in 2017. There are a handful of other fully online schools scattered across the country.

Annual tuition for Purdue’s part-time online program is about $13,500. By comparison, annual tuition for ABA-accredited Southwestern Law School’s new fully online program is the same as its residential program — $38,944 for part-time students.

“I am very happy to see that the ABA is finally considering moving in this direction,” said Purdue Law Dean Martin Pritikin said Monday. “Virtually every other field of higher education has been quicker to embrace online learning.” Read more: First all-remote, full-time law degree with ABA blessing set to start next fall Online law school seeks bar exam eligibility in Indiana Get the latest legal news of the day delivered straight to your inbox with The Afternoon Docket.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab Karen Sloan reports on law firms, law schools, and the business of law. Reach her at karen.sloan@thomsonreuters.com