July 24, 2026

Washington State Bar Association
Board of Governors Meeting
Tulalip, WA
Submitted electronically

Re: Proposed Amendment to the Admissions Policies Re Definition of Approved Law School

To the Washington State Bar Association Board of Governors: 

Veterans Education Success is a nonprofit organization that works on a bipartisan basis to advance higher education success for veterans, service members, and military families. We have helped more than 5000 students in the last decade, many of whom had negative experiences at low-quality schools that did not deliver on their promises and left veterans in  debt. As a result, it is our organizational priority to pursue policies that ensure quality education and good outcomes for veterans, service members, and their families. 

We have previously shared concerns involving non-ABA-accredited law schools with Indiana and California, and we would like to share those concerns with you as you consider a change to your definition of an approved law school. We hope you will vote against the proposed amendment. 

The proposed amendment would allow law school graduates to sit for the Washington bar exam if their law school is approved or accredited by a state or territory of the United States and if graduates of their school are eligible to sit for the bar exam in a state or territory. We are concerned that the proposed amendment would add the Washington stamp of approval to subpar schools, while undercutting the important role that ABA accreditation has played in ensuring quality education for students as well as quality in the legal profession. The proposed amendment’s reliance on the Department of Education’s institutional accreditation process and other states’ approval processes and its lack of threshold metrics barring subpar schools do not ensure quality for students or prospective clients. Given the long history of aggressive and deceptive recruiting by for-profit companies that run chains of online, low-quality, improperly accredited, subpar colleges and law schools, we have a special fear that the amendment could perversely enable predatory schools to recruit students by promising that they will be eligible to take the bar exam in Washington, even if the school cannot deliver an education that will prepare the student to pass.   

Accreditation is an important safeguard of institutional quality

The accreditation process is key to ensuring that law schools deliver on the promises they make to students about providing a quality legal education and preparing students for success in their legal careers. In order to earn ABA accreditation, law schools must demonstrate that they comply with a number of important factors that ensure a quality legal education. Among the many requirements, ABA-accredited law schools must: 

  • meet certain benchmarks with regard to the size, qualifications, and responsibilities of faculty; 
  • demonstrate a curriculum and learning outcomes that meet standards and provide experiential learning opportunities; 
  • publish policies related to topics such as admissions, student support, handling student complaints, discrimination, and disability accommodation; and 
  • provide disclosures to students about important topics, including admissions and enrollment data, class sizes, employment outcomes, and bar passage data. 

The ABA’s standards ensure that law students receive a thorough legal education and are prepared to work as licensed lawyers. The proposed amendment would not replace ABA accreditation with any other defined, rigorous review process. If law schools could bypass ABA accreditation but still leave their students eligible to take the Washington state bar exam, the important quality-assurance role of ABA accreditation would be undermined, and Washington would demonstrably lower the bar for entry to the legal profession. 

Increasing access to the legal profession is important, but there must be a mechanism in place to ensure that the quality of legal representation in the state will not dip and that student outcomes will be positive. Because of this quality concern, Congress ensured, in a nearly unanimous vote, that only law schools that are approved by the ABA are eligible to receive GI Bill educational benefits. Congress particularly considered the case of California’s law schools that lack ABA approval and determined these should not be eligible for the GI Bill. If Washington follows the same path, such law schools will also not be eligible for the GI Bill.

A letter to the Board of Governors states that one protection for students is institutional accreditation, saying “a majority (83%) of the evaluated state-approved law schools are already bound by rigorous U.S. Department of Education institutional accreditation.” However, it is extremely important to understand the difference between institutional accreditation and programmatic accreditation at the Department of Education. Institutional accreditation of an overall university has nothing to do with its law school’s qualifications. Institutional accreditation regards the overall university and is primarily focused on the undergraduate programs of education. Department of Education officials and accreditors who provide institutional accreditation do not claim to have any knowledge of legal education or what would constitute an adequate law school, and they do not claim that their institutional accreditation says anything about the adequacy of the law school (nor the medical school, for that matter, which would be specially accredited by the country’s medical school accreditor). The Department of Education’s institutional accreditation does not in any way compare to the technical, specialized review of a programmatic accreditor, especially given that there are already concerns that institutional accreditation isn’t particularly rigorous at all. 

Additionally, the Report on Washington’s Expansion of Law School Approval Beyond ABA Accreditation states that many of the programs “already operate under robust, dual layers of regulatory oversight,” because the states also accredit the programs. Specifically, it refers to California’s “strict five-year minimum cumulative bar passage baseline of 40%.” But a 40% bar passage rate is significantly lower than the ABA’s baseline of 75% passage within two years, and proponents provide no justification as to why oversight is considered “robust” if more than half of an approved school’s test-takers can be without bar passage five years after graduation. A school that is so subpar that the ABA does not recognize it as a law school, or a school that does not seek ABA accreditation but has such a low bar passage rate, raises serious doubts that the school is teaching legal fundamentals well enough to prepare graduates to practice as lawyers.

There is a long history of predatory, aggressive, and deceptive recruiting of low-income students by subpar, for-profit education companies. We are concerned that the proposed amendment would provide an open invitation to predatory, low-quality law schools to recruit unwitting students who would invest money in a subpar legal degree but not be adequately prepared to pass the state bar exam or gain adequate legal skills. 

We have heard from thousands of students whose schools made false promises to entice them to pour money into their programs and could not deliver on those promises, leaving the students worse off than when they started. Several students have shared that they had extremely negative experiences attending non-ABA-accredited law schools:

  • One student testified at a Senate Committee hearing that the for-profit law school Concord School of Law, run by Kaplan Education Company, promised him a high-paying legal career. But after six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, he learned for the first time from an adjunct professors’ off-hand remark that he would not be eligible to take the bar exam in nearly every state with that degree.
  • Another student shared that the educational standards at Concord Law School were incredibly low and that grades were manipulated. He said, “I feel sorry for the students that will go through this program and still not be equipped to pass the bar because they will not receive the education they rightfully deserved. The tactics, lies, manipulation, and stealing of federal funding from students is appalling. Who is going to stand up for all of these students? I have talked to dozens of students who were never told that they had to take the California bar or would only be eligible to practice in California.”  
  • A third student told us how she was strung along for five years, retaking (and passing) Constitutional Law three times but still not receiving her degree from Pacific Coast University School of Law. The school was California-accredited when she enrolled, although it eventually lost that accreditation.

Students should not take on the considerable financial burden of earning a law degree without a reasonable assurance that the education they pay for will adequately prepare and qualify them to not only sit for, but also pass, the bar exam and to have the skills and knowledge necessary to serve in the legal profession. ABA accreditation is currently the only such assurance available to law students. Since there is already a pathway to licensure for these lawyers via admission by motion, there is no need to make it much easier for schools that may be subpar or predatory to take advantage of Washington students. 

Student outcomes at some unaccredited schools raise quality concerns

One aspect of the proposed amendment is that students who graduate from a non-ABA-accredited law school would be allowed to take the Washington state bar exam if they are eligible to take the bar exam in another state. But this provision provides little protection for students and consumers of legal services because many low-performing, non-ABA-accredited law schools easily meet the condition in the proposed amendment. Specifically, California allows students to take its bar exam even if their law school is not accredited by the ABA but is merely California-accredited or even unaccredited, and the bar passage rates are significantly lower in these two groups. 

A recent report published by the State Bar of California documents a large disparity in bar passage rates between test-takers from ABA-accredited law schools and test-takers from other law schools. Only 19.7% of test-takers from California-accredited (but not ABA-accredited) law schools passed the July 2025 California bar exam, and only 10.2% of test-takers from unaccredited law schools passed the same exam. By contrast, 77.3% of test-takers from ABA-accredited schools in California passed the July 2025 exam. 

If the proposed amendment is adopted, unaccredited law schools with poor student outcomes run by predatory for-profit education companies would be able to point to the Washington rule and recruit students with the promise that they can sit for the Washington State bar exam, regardless of the likelihood that those students will pass. Because the proposed amendment would not require minimum licensure exam pass rates for non-ABA-accredited schools, it would create a perverse incentive for the lowest quality and most predatory operations to victimize low-income, unknowing students by claiming an illusory legitimacy in Washington. 

Recommendations

We strongly urge the Board of Governors to consider the potential effect on low-income, unwitting students who attend law schools that would not prepare them to pass the bar or adequately serve as lawyers. They may end up with a large amount of debt but no increase to their earning potential or path to employment in their desired profession. We urge you to reject the proposed amendment. 

In the event that you nevertheless wish to pass the proposed amendment, we strongly urge you to add safeguards to protect prospective students, such as requiring a minimum bar passage rate equal to the ABA-required rate. Requiring a minimum bar passage rate for schools would at least prevent the worst performing schools from recruiting prospective students with promises of a path to a legal career in Washington. Indeed, we urge you to consider requiring the non-ABA-accredited law schools to meet all other requirements of ABA accreditation in order for its graduates to sit for the bar exam in Washington. The Report on Washington’s Expansion of Law School Approval Beyond ABA Accreditation states that non-ABA-accredited schools are not necessarily “unable to qualify for ABA accreditation” or “inherently inferior” to schools that do. Therefore, they should be able to meet similar, rigorous standards that help ensure students will see a return on their investment.

Thank you for providing an opportunity for public comment. We hope that our comments and recommendations will assist the Board of Governors in its process.

Sincerely,

Allison Muth
Director of Veterans Services and Civic Engagement
Veterans Education Success

1 Our letter to the Indiana Supreme Court regarding proposed rule for unaccredited law schools, Veterans Education Success (Dec. 15, 2023), https://vetsedsuccess.org/our-letter-to-the-indiana-supreme-court-regarding-proposed-rule-for-unaccredited-law-schools/; Our Testimony to the California Senate Judiciary Committee on Assembly Joint Resolution No. 12, Veterans Education Success (Jul. 2021), https://vetsedsuccess.org/our-testimony-to-the-california-senate-judiciary-committee-on-assembly-joint-resolution-no-12/; Letter from The Nation’s Leading Military and Veteran-Serving Organizations to California Legislators on Assembly Joint Resolution No. 12, Veterans Education Success (Jul. 2, 2021), https://vetsedsuccess.org/letter-from-the-nations-leading-military-and-veteran-serving-organizations-to-california-legislators-on-assembly-joint-resolution-no-12/.

2 38 U.S.C. § 3676(c)(15)(B) and 38 U.S.C. § 3676(c)(16)(B), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/38/3676.

3 Letter from Jordan Couch and Renata de Carvalho Garcia to Board of Governors, Washington State Bar Association (Jul. 14, 2026), accessed via Board of Governors Meeting Materials, https://www.wsba.org/about-wsba/who-we-are/board-of-governors (p. 484).

4 Title IV Accreditation: Regulatory Capture and Competition, Veterans Education Success (Apr. 2026), https://vetsedsuccess.org/title-iv-accreditation-regulatory-capture-and-competition/.

5 Report on Washington’s Expansion of Law School Approval Beyond ABA Accreditation, Washington State Bar Association (Jul. 14, 2026), accessed via Board of Governors Meeting Materials,

6 For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success, Majority Committee Staff Report and Accompanying Minority Committee Staff Views, United States Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (Jul. 30, 2012), https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/for_profit_report/PartI.pdf; Schools Receiving the Most Post-9/11 GI Bill Tuition and Fee Payments Since 2009, Veterans Education Success (Mar. 2018), https://vetsedsuccess.org/schools-receiving-the-most-post-9-11-gi-bill-tuition-and-fee-payments-since-2009/.

7 General Statistics Report, July 2025 California Bar Exam, The State Bar of California, https://www.calbar.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/July-2025-CBX-Statistics.pdf.

8 Report on Washington’s Expansion of Law School Approval Beyond ABA Accreditation, Washington State Bar Association (Jul. 14, 2026), accessed via Board of Governors Meeting Materials, https://www.wsba.org/about-wsba/who-we-are/board-of-governors (pp. 491-492).

Washington State Bar Association Comments