More reasons to stress about the bar exam

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new study—The Marooned Law School Graduates: An Empirical Investigation of Law School Graduates that Fail the Bar—showing that students who fail the bar not only lag behind bar passers, they fail to measure up to college grads who didn’t go to law school in terms of ‘earnings, employment stability, and even marriage and divorce rates.’  From the abstract:

What happens to law school graduates that fail the bar exam? This invisible population makes up a significant portion of the graduating law school classes, but we don't know anything about their long-term prospects. We don't even know how many of them there are. In contrast to the rich body of literature examining the long-term outcomes of lawyers, this is the first serious attempt to understand the costs imposed by bar failure. [ … ] Law school graduates that never succeed in passing a bar exam have a very difficult 'first term.' Five to ten years out of law school, they lag well behind lawyers on every measure - earnings, employment stability, even marriage and divorce rates. Moreover, as a group, bar-failers fare worse than college graduates despite having left college with better-than-average grades.

                                      -posted by brian