The Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic
Development has several path-breaking and successful pipeline
initiatives designed to increase the pool of students of color
going to law school, lawyers of color entering legal academia and
lawyers of color interested in higher education
administration.
The RHB Center's flagship pipeline program is the Ronald H. Brown
Prep Program for College Students, which we launched in 2005. Over
the years, the Prep Program has grown and thrived in partnership
with:
- John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Department of Latin
American and Latina/o Studies
- Medgar Evers College/CUNY
- St. John’s University
- York College/CUNY
- United Negro College Fund Colleges
The Prep Program aims to encourage students from
underrepresented backgrounds − often the first members of their
family to attend college − to apply to law school and pursue the
study and practice of law.
Through a rigorous selection process, each participating
undergraduate college selects sophomores to attend a nine-week
summer program during which they take law school courses taught by
St. John’s faculty, engage in internships with judges and lawyers
in a variety of practice settings and receive ample guidance on the
law school admissions process.
Students who successfully complete the program for sophomores can
apply to participate in the program for juniors the following
summer, when they take a comprehensively designed LSAT prep course,
attend motivational workshops and work with a legal writing
professor to write their personal statements.
In recent years, Prep Program participants have increased their
LSAT scores by an average of 10 points. More importantly, earning
scholarships in the aggregate of $6 million dollars, over 80
percent of program graduates have been accepted to at least one law
school, including:
- American University
- Boston College
- Cornell University
- Duke University
- Emory University
- Fordham University
- George Washington University
- Georgetown University
- New York University
- St. John’s University
- University of California Berkeley
- University of California Davis
- University of California Los Angeles
- University of Michigan
- University of Pennsylvania
- Wake Forest University
- Yale University
In 2011, the American Bar Association Council for Racial and
Ethnic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline named the Ronald H.
Brown Prep Program for College Students the recipient of its
Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity. The
Alexander Award recognizes an individual or organization for
success in working along the educational pipeline in a
collaborative approach involving more than one segment of the
continuum from elementary to high school to college to law school
to the practice. The Award is named for Raymond Pace and Sade
Tanner Mossell Alexander. Raymond Alexander was Wharton’s first
African American graduate, a multi-term president of the National
Bar Association, and the first black judge on the Common Pleas
Court of Philadelphia. In the early 1930s, he took two Chester
County school districts to court in a racial segregation case. His
victory ended de jure segregation in Pennsylvania schools. Sadie
Alexander, Raymond’s wife, was the first African American woman to
receive a Ph.D. in the United States, the first woman to receive a
law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the
first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority,
Incorporated.
For more information on the Ronald H. Brown Prep Program for
College Students, please
contact us.