The Transfer Game

One of the rituals of the end of the spring semester is the trickle of students coming into my office and announcing, with varying degrees of sheepishness, that they're considering transferring, and asking if I'd be willing to write a recommendation letter.  So it's quite timely that the Journal of Legal Education's current issue has an article by Jeffrey Rensberger (South Texas) examining the transfer phenomenon.  It's a good read, and important for anyone interested in legal education.

Aside from collating statistics confirming the intuition that students transfer to higher-ranked schools (rather than primarily for geographic or educational-program reasons), Rensberger considers the effects of transferring, both on legal education generally and individual students.  He makes the important argument that the gains intake schools enjoy from transfer students are outweighed by the losses suffered by outflow schools.  To oversimplify, his argument is that transfer candidates, because they perform better, are more likely to contribute to rich classroom discussion and are more likely to succeed both on the bar and in their careers.  (I'm not sure I agree on the career success point, but that may be because I have a broader definition of what constitutes career success.  But he is likely right on the first two points.)  He argues that these gains enjoyed by intake schools are less than the corresponding losses suffered by outflow schools, essentially because the intake schools already have a good number of students who are likely to contribute to the school's success; one more such student doesn't change the atmosphere much.  By contrast, the outflow schools don't enjoy a surfeit of such students, and suffer relatively more when the active, creative class participant and future first-time bar passer leaves.

I agree with this much of Rensberger's analysis.  I've felt real disappointment when first-year stars have sought to transfer, exactly because these students were so great in the classroom and were no bar pass risks.  But I'm not so sure about the next part.  Rensberger then considers the problem from the perspective of the outflow school.  He paints a picture of a school that has taken a chance on a risky student (by definition, he suggests, since the higher-ranked school didn't pick that student originally), and invested time and money in developing her, only to see her poached (his word) by the inflow school.  With the caveat that I'm not speaking from actual data, I'm not sure I agree with this picture.  My sense is that a number of transfer students were toward the top of the outflow school's entering class, based on LSAT/UGPA.  Not always, but enough that it's familiar for me to have a student poring over the choice between foregoing a continuing merit scholarship and transferring up the food chain.

What does this difference mean?  At first blush, it suggests that there's nothing seriously insidious with the current transfer situation.  Remember that U.S. News fails to consider the credentials of incoming transfer students as part of a school's overall student quality.  Thus, if intake schools are just picking up the students they would have taken originally had they not been pushed by U.S. News to artificially bump up selectivity and entering student credentials, then in essence lower-ranked schools have just rented those students for a year, before they found their "natural" place in the law school hierarchy.

But there's more to it, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  First, higher-ranked schools are foregoing first-year tuition for those students they passed on originally and took only as transfers.  Thus, all other things being equal, for their books to clear they need to take a larger number of transfers than they would otherwise take as additional first-years, to make up for that year's worth of lost tuition. Therefore, there's an additional volume of transfer outflow.

What this suggests is that we need to ask whether, for outflow schools, it's worth it to have these students for a year, even if they lose them (and, indeed, lose more than what they would otherwise lose, given the tuition analysis in the previous paragraph).  Is it better to have taught good students and lost (more of) them, then to never have taught them at all?  Rensberger doesn't directly address this aspect of the problem, which I think cuts in both directions.  On the one hand, there is surely a demoralization effect as the best students in the first-year class climb a rung on the career ladder while leaving their classmates behind.  On the other hand, the performance of these out-bound students in the first class may well have an inspirational effect that lasts beyond their departure.  I'm not sure how one would measure these effects, but it would be interesting to see the results, if one could.

Second, there's the impact on transfer students themselves.  Rensberger discusses this in the context of those students' job prospects, and, in particular, their prospects in light of the choice between graduating at the top of their original matriculating school and possibly in the middle or worse of their transfer school.  This is important, and something students often don't appreciate.  But there's more.  Transfer candidates are, by definition, stars in their original school.  They'll get the RA positions, the recommendations, the law review and moot court positions, and, generally, every intangible goody that a law school can bestow.  In my experience, these benefits are often undervalued by transfer candidates -- unsurprisingly, since they haven't experienced them yet.  They also lose out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes from having gone through first year together.  This isn't just a matter of having a lot of drinking buddies -- it's also a matter of developing the core of one's professional network.

So, in sum, transferring is a decidedly mixed bag.  Rensberger concludes, correctly, I think, that the transfer game is an overall net negative for legal education.  My own sense is that it's often at best a mixed blessing for the students who play it.  Ideally, higher-ranked schools wouldn't game the system by artificially restricting their first-year classes for U.S. News reasons and then making up the financial shortfall by taking more than their "natural" share of transfer students.  But that would mean that schools aren't playing the U.S. News game.