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 shrinking, having declined from 5.5% in 2014, to 4.7% in 2016, to 3.4% in 2019, and then to 3.0% in 2022, where it has remained in 2023 and 2024.  Aside from a slight bump in 2017, and another bump in 2020, there has been a continuous gradual decline in transfers over the last several years – from nearly 2200 to less than 1200 and from 5.5% of first-years in the previous fall to 3.0% (both down over 45%).

TABLE 1 – Number of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers from 2014-2024

After an increase in transfers in 2020, we saw declines in 2021 (to 1375 and 3.6%), 2022 (to 1231 and 3.0%), and 2023 (to 1162 and 3.0%) – the lowest number and percentage in a decade. While the number of transfers increased slightly in 2024, because there was a corresponding increase in the number of first-years, the percentage remained flat at 3.0%.

As I noted in my previous blogs, I believe the consistent decline in transfers is directly related to the increase in scholarship assistance over the last decade, including the elimination of conditional scholarships at dozens of law schools, which has made the financial calculus associated with transferring much less attractive. (The ABA defines a “conditional scholarship” as any scholarship “the retention of which is dependent upon the student maintaining a minimum grade point average or class standing” other than good standing. The number of law schools with conditional scholarship dropped from roughly 140 in 2011 to fewer than 70 as of 2023.)  If a student were going to be paying full tuition at a given law school either because they did not receive a scholarship or lost a conditional scholarship and could transfer to a much higher ranked law school in the region for only marginal additional cost (and perhaps without having to move), transferring might make sense. But if a student has to forego scholarship assistance and absorb significantly more financial cost to transfer, then staying at the student’s initial law school makes more sense.

In addition, with the dramatic improvement in employment outcomes across law schools generally, with 81% of May 2024 graduates landing full-time, long-term bar passage required positions, the likelihood of having significantly better employment prospects at a school to which one might transfer also seems less compelling.

SOME LAW SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE THE TRANSFER MARKET

Table 2 below lists the top 15 law schools participating in the transfer market in descending order in Summer 2021 (fall 2020 entering class), Summer 2022 (fall 2021 entering class), Summer 2023 (fall 2022 entering class), and Summer 2024.

(Note that in Table 2, Table 4, and Table 5 the “repeat players” are bolded – those schools in the top 15 for all four years are in black, those schools in the top 15 for three of the four years are in blue.) Seven of the top 15 for 2024 have been on the list for taking in the largest number of transfers all four years: Columbia, Florida, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, and Northwestern.  Four others have been on the list for three of the four years: Arizona State, NYU, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.  Table 2 also shows that for 2024, the concentration of transfers in the top 15 law schools for transfers remained near 50%, down just slightly from 2023.

TABLE 2 – Largest Law Schools by Number of Transfers from 2021-2024

As shown in Table 3 below, if we focus just on the top ten law schools for transfers in, the total number of transfers is 481 – 40% of all transfers – the second highest percentage in the last decade.

TABLE 3 – Totals for Top Ten Law Schools for Transfers In as a Percentage of All Transfers for 2014-2024

In terms of law schools with the highest percentage of transfers in as a percentage of their previous year’s first-year class, as shown below in Table 4, nine law schools have been on the list each of the last four years – Florida, Florida State, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, Northwestern, UNLV, and Vanderbilt.  Three law schools have been on the list three times in the last four years – Chicago, Florida Int’l, and NYU.  Four schools have been on the list in two of the last four years – Arizona State, Columbia, Houston and UCLA. The number of law schools welcoming transfers representing 20% or more of their first-year class has fallen from nine in 2013 (not shown), to none in 2019, four in 2020, two in 2021, and only one in 2022, 2023, and 2024. 

TABLE 4 – Largest Law Schools by Transfers as a Percentage of Previous First-Year Class – 2021-2024

TRANSFER FEEDER SCHOOLS

There also are some law schools that appear consistently in the list of top feeder schools for transfers as shown below in Table 5. These fifteen schools have been responsible for roughly 25-30% of transfer students in each of the last three years.

TABLE 5 – Largest Law Schools by Transfers Out for 2021-2024

Six law schools have been on the list of top transfer out law schools in each of the last four years – American, Brooklyn Law School, George Washington University, Nova Southeastern, University of California College of the Law – San Francisco, and the University of Miami.  There are three additional law schools on the list in three of the last four years: Barry University, University of Maryland, and Touro University.

Notably, one of these schools – George Washington University – shows up on both the transfer out in Table 5 and the transfer in list above in Table 2.  They are losing students to higher-ranked law schools and then back-filling with their own transfers from lower-ranked schools.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MARKETS –

Starting in December 2014, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar began collecting and requiring law schools with 12 or more transfers in to report not only the number of students who have transferred in, but also the law schools from which they came (indicating the number from each law school). In addition, the law schools with 12 or more transfers in had to report the 75%, 50% and 25% first-year law school GPAs of the students who transferred in. This allows one to look at where students are coming from and are going to, as well as the first-year GPA profile of students transferring in to different law schools.

Table 6 below focuses on the seven law schools in Table 2 that have been among the top15 in terms of number of transfers in for each of the last four years, presented in descending U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) rank. Table 6 indicates the extent to which these seven law schools were attracting transfers from the geographic region in which they are located and highlights that the transfer market, to some extent, is a set of regional sub-markets.

TABLE 6 – Percentage of Transfers from Within Geographic Region 2022-2023-2024 and Top Feeder School for 2024 at Each of the Seven Law Schools among the Top 15 for Transfers In for 2022, 2023, and 2024

Five of the seven law schools had at least 44% of their transfers from the region in which they are located.  Two of these seven law schools, Northwestern and Florida, obtained 50% or more of their transfers from the geographic region within which the law school is located for the last three years. On the other hand, Harvard is the only law school to have 35% or fewer transfers from its own region all three years, while Georgetown is the only other law school to have less than half of their transfers from its own region all three years.

When one looks at the transfer out schools in Table 5 in comparison with the transfer in schools in Table 2, one can see some of the regional realities.  In the state of Florida, Nova Southeastern and Miami, followed by Barry University and to a lesser extent, St. Thomas University and Stetson, are transfer feeder schools for the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and to a lesser extent for Miami, Florida International, and Florida State, who received a number of those transfers.  In the Mid-Atlantic, American, George Washington, and to a lesser extent Maryland, Baltimore, and Catholic are transfer feeder schools for Georgetown, with George Washington and George Mason receiving a number of transfers, too.  In California, the University of California College of Law San Francisco, and to a lesser extent Loyola Marymount and Southwestern are transfer feeder schools for the University of California Berkeley and University of California Los Angeles.  Miami, George Washington, and Loyola Marymount are the unique players in each region as they tend to lose a significant number of transfers and also accept a significant number of transfers.

Table 6 also identifies the law school that provided the largest number of transfers to each listed law school in 2024, as well as the percentage of transfers that came from that school.  One of the seven law schools had a significant percentage (more than 20%) of its transfers in from one feeder school – George Washington with 25% of its transfers coming from American (which also was the biggest supplier of transfers to Georgetown and George Mason!).  Similarly, Northwestern took 20% of its transfers from Loyola Chicago.

Notably, six of the seven law schools that have been the most consistent players in the transfer market over the last four years are on the East Coast (Columbia, Florida, George Mason Georgetown, George Washington, and Harvard) while one is in the Midwest (Northwestern).

VARIED QUALITY OF THE TRANSFER POOL

Table 7 below shows the tiers of law schools from which these seven largest law schools in the transfer market for each of the last four years received their transfer students.  Four of the seven law schools that consistently have high numbers of transfers in are ranked in the top 15 in U.S. News, while the other three are ranked between 31 (George Mason and George Washington) and 38 (Florida).

TABLE 7 – Percentage of Transfers from Different Tiers of School(s) for 2022, 2023, and 2024 at the Seven Law Schools Among the Top 15 for Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024

(Bolded data indicates the modal percentage response for each law school.)

Two of the seven law schools – Harvard (no lower than 72%) and Columbia (no lower than 55%) – have consistently had large percentages of their transfers from law schools ranked between 1 and 50 in the U.S. News rankings.  By contrast, in 2024, three of these seven law schools had more than 50% of their transfers from law schools ranked 101 or lower (Florida, George Mason, George Washington).

TABLE 8 – First-Year Law School 75th/50th/25th GPA of Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top 15 for Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024

Table 8 above highlights the reported GPAs of transfers in for these seven law schools.  In looking at Table 8, one quickly sees that of the four law schools ranked in the U.S. News top 15, only one – Harvard – has a 50th GPA for transfers in 2023 that is above 3.9, and a 25th GPA of 3.8 and above. Harvard also is accepting most of its transfers from top 50 law schools, making it clear that it is accepting transfers in who could have been admitted to Harvard in the first instance. Columbia is a close second, with all three of its metrics close to 0.1 below those of Harvard.

The other two top 15 law schools – Northwestern and Georgetown – are a step below in terms of the credentials of their transfers, with 50th GPAs of 3.8 and 3.69, respectively, and with 25th GPAs of 3.63 and 3.59, respectively, in 2024.  In 2024, 60% or more of Northwestern’s and Georgetown’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower.  For Georgetown and Northwestern, with a majority of their transfers coming from law schools ranked outside the top 50, many of these transfer students may not have had the credentials to be admitted as first-year students at Georgetown or Northwestern.

Once you drop out of the top 15, the other three law schools – Florida (3.51), George Washington (3.36) and George Mason (3.26) – each has a 50th GPA well below that of the other four law schools on the list and 25th GPAs that drop to 3.44, 3.19, and 3.14, respectively.  With 80% or more of these transfers coming from law schools ranked 51 or lower, these law schools clearly are welcoming a number of transfer students whose entering credentials almost certainly were sufficiently distinct from each of those law schools’ entering class credentials such that the transfer students they are admitting would not have been admitted as first-year students in the prior year.

STILL MANY UNKNOWNS

As I have noted for the last few years, these more detailed transfer data from the ABA should be very helpful to prospective law students and pre-law advisors, and to current law students who are considering transferring. These data give them a better idea of what transfer opportunities might be available depending upon where they are planning to go to law school (or are presently enrolled as a first-year student).

Even with these more granular data now available, however, there still are a significant number of unknowns relating to transfer students, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity of transfer students and performance of transfer students at their new law school (both academically and in terms of bar passage and employment).

With the increased emphasis on professional identity formation reflected in ABA Standard 303(b)(3) and (c), there may be questions about how law schools are addressing professional identity formation for transfer students, particularly at those law schools that have added a first-year course/program focused on professional development or professional identity formation.

Are these law schools requiring transfers to take these courses with their incoming first-year students? Are there specific professional development or professional identity formation courses structured for transfer students at those law schools with a significant cohort of transfer students (10-15 or more)?  Are there better ways to address the professional identity formation of transfer students that would help them integrate into the law school community where they are transferring? These are questions for which additional research would be warranted.

Please feel free to contact me at jmorgan@stthomas.edu should you have any comments or questions.

I am very grateful for the help of research assistant Alena Stankaitis in compiling some of the information for this blog posting and for helpful comments from my colleague, David Grenardo.