The Effect of the Uniform Bar Examination on Admissions, Diversity, Affordability, and Employment Across Law Schools in the United States

Abstract

The Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) is a multijurisdictional test that law students can use to gain admission to the bar in 37 states and territories. Despite this near-universal applicability and the potential of UBE to affect law schools’ admissions, diversity, affordability, and employment outcomes, no research to date has examined the impacts of UBE. Equipped with a novel data set that we make available to future researchers, we apply a difference-in-differences design to estimate these impacts by exploiting variation in UBE adoption timing across states. We find early evidence to suggest that law schools in UBE states benefited by receiving more applications and having higher overall enrollments after UBE adoption.