Arizona Summit. Photo courtesy of AZCentral.com.
Source: Arizona Summit is now in trouble with the ABA over its finances.
Arizona Summit Law School was placed on probation by the American Bar Association (ABA) for its low bar passage rates, and it is now in trouble again for its finances.
According to The Republic, the private law school was notified on January 4th about its financial non-compliance after the ABA reviewed its status in December. The ABA, which oversees law school accreditation said, “the current and anticipated financial resources available to the law school shall be sufficient for it to operate in compliance with the standards and to carry out its program of legal education.” The letter did not include non-compliance details, and the ABA declined to comment on the case to the publication.
Arizona Summit’s president Don Lively said that they have cut costs to maintain a “much smaller school” and that the law school will update the ABA in the next few months about new developments in their financials.
In October, the state bar released data that showed only one in four Arizona Summit graduates passed the bar exam on their first try. In March, the ABA placed the school on probation for this abysmal statistic as well as their low admission standards.
Arizona Summit was previously called Phoenix School of Law, and it is a for-profit law school created by InfiLaw, which has come under fire for its allegedly predatory practices.
In 2015, The Atlantic published a post that said the InfiLaw law schools were scams that took in low-performing students, promised them careers, and then left them in huge debt. The publication said that Infilaw admission standards were so low that the schools basically had open enrollment systems.
“They are now admitting huge numbers of students with credentials including lower LSAT scores and GPAs that would have barred them from getting into these schools three years ago,” The Atlantic states. “The admissions process at the InfiLaw schools is now close to a fully open-enrollment system, that inevitably matriculates many people who have little chance of ever passing a bar exam.”
An Arizona Summit official told The Republic that the school was raising its admission standards and were working on becoming ABA-compliant.
“My goal is to take us back to a time when we were very successful on the bar and had 75 and 80 percent (pass) range,” Arizona Summit Interim Dean Penny Willrich said. “I think we can get there with all the changes that have taken place. But of course, it’s going to take a little bit of time.”