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. Today, we are speaking in support of the ABA and its important role in safeguarding the quality of law school education.

The accreditation process is key to ensuring that law schools deliver on their promises to provide a quality legal education and prepare students for success in their legal careers.

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 sit for, and pass, the bar exam and to become skillful and knowledgeable lawyers. ABA accreditation is currently the only quality assurance available to law students and the licensed legal profession and it ensures faculty qualifications, adequate course requirements, experiential learning, and more.

There is a long and well-documented history of pernicious, aggressive and deceptive recruiting by predatory sales reps for for-profit colleges, who make false promises to enroll students into their programs and leave them worse off than when they started.

  • One student told a Senate committee that Concord School of Law promised him a high-paying legal career. But after six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, he learned from an off-hand remark that he would not be eligible to take the bar exam in nearly every state.
  • Another student shared that the educational standards at Concord 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 … The tactics, lies, manipulation, and stealing of federal funding from students is appalling. ”
  • 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.

77.3% of test-takers from ABA-accredited schools in California passed the July 2025 California bar exam. By contrast, only 19.7% of test-takers from California-accredited law schools, and only 10.2% of test-takers from unaccredited law schools, passed the same exam.

Because of this quality concern, Congress ensured, in a nearly unanimous vote, that only ABA-approved law schools are eligible to receive GI Bill benefits.

As NACIQI is aware, institutional accreditation includes no assessment of an institution’s medical or law schools, which receive specialized programmatic accreditation to ensure quality in licensed occupations. The Department of Education should continue to recognize the ABA and its important work as a programmatic accreditor. ABA approval provides an important protection for students that the school is teaching legal fundamentals well enough to prepare graduates to practice as lawyers. It prevents predatory, low-quality law schools from recruiting unwitting students who would invest money in a subpar legal degree but not be prepared to pass the state bar exam or gain adequate legal skills.

NACIQI ABA Comments