The ABA-approved designation ensures that every student who attends an ABA school -- ranging from Harvard to your local state school -- receives a quality education which meets the stringent requirements of the American Bar Association. These requirements include admission standards, curriculum requirements and quality of faculty. Schools not approved by the ABA do not have to follow these requirements and may not be regulated by any authority to ensure that you are receiving a quality legal education.
Every student who graduates with a juris doctor (JD) degree from an ABA approved law school is eligible to take the bar exam in any of the 50 states, regardless of the location of the law school. Some states allow graduates of non-ABA approved law schools to sit for the bar exam, but there may be additional limitations or restrictions placed on your application, such as the requirement that you practice in another state for a specified number of years.
California is one of the states that allows graduates of non-ABA approved schools to take the state bar exam. But there is an additional restriction placed on these students that they must pass an exam after the first year of law school that tests them on the basic law school subjects. Students at ABA-approved schools are exempt from this requirement and may take the bar exam after graduation without any qualifying test. According to the state bar of California, the passage rate for first-timers taking the qualifying test was 27.6% for June 2010. Even if you pass the first year exam in California, you must still take the bar exam after graduating from law school. For first time applicants who graduate from California ABA-approved schools, the pass rate was 75.2% for the July 2010 exam. For first-time takers from non-ABA schools, the pass rate for the same exam was 40.4%. The numbers are even more dismal for repeat exam takers, with only 11.2% of unaccredited school graduates passing the exam on subsequent tries.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), competition for attorney jobs is expected to remain strong, with attorneys having the best grades from the nation's top ABA-approved schools getting the best jobs. The BLS points out that geographic mobility is important for landing a job -- the ability to move from state to state will be more difficult with a degree from a non-ABA approved school because of the different requirements of each state to sit for the bar exam. The legal career is not one which is considered recession-proof. The availability of legal jobs is strongly tied to the overall economy, with times of recession or economic downturn resulting in fewer attorney jobs. The National Association for Legal Career Professionals reports that the law school class of 2009 had an employment rate of 88.3%, with almost 25% of those jobs being regarded as temporary. Of these 88.3% employed, many graduates were employed in positions not requiring a JD or bar passage.