Duquesne's first-time bar passage rate sits meaningfully above the Pennsylvania statewide average, and the data pack shows this in two overlapping ways. Across the reporting period compiled for this guide, 89.66% of Duquesne test-takers passed the Pennsylvania bar exam on their first attempt, against a statewide average of 79.97% for ABA-approved law school graduates — a gap of roughly 9.7 percentage points. A separate, graduate-specific figure for the 2024 cohort tells a very similar story: 120 of 135 first-time takers passed (88.89%), compared to a statewide rate of 80.25% that year. The two figures come from slightly different reporting slices, but they converge on the same conclusion: Duquesne graduates have consistently outperformed the state average by roughly 8 to 10 points, not just in one anomalous year.
The ultimate (two-year) passage rate is even more telling. Among Duquesne test-takers given up to two years to pass, 95.12% eventually did. That number matters because a single administration's pass rate can be noisy — it reflects one test date, one set of essay questions, one round of nerves. A 95% ultimate rate says that the small minority of Duquesne graduates who don't clear the bar on the first try are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, clearing it soon after. For a prospective student, that combination — a first-time rate well above the state average and a near-universal ultimate rate — is a more honest signal of bar preparedness than either number in isolation.
What does the data pack say (and not say) about why?
The pack does not include a named bar-prep curriculum or a stated institutional strategy behind these numbers, so any specific causal claim beyond what's documented would be speculation. What the pack does show is a law school built around extensive hands-on and simulation-based coursework, which is at minimum consistent with — even if not proven to cause — strong bar outcomes. Duquesne reports 59 clinic seats available, with 46 filled; 97 filled field placements; and 343 filled simulation-course seats. The clinical program runs out of the Tribone Center for Clinical Legal Education, located near Pittsburgh's downtown courts and government offices. That's a large volume of practice-based instruction relative to a total J.D. enrollment of 528 students and an entering class of 184. Students who spend a substantial part of their three years in clinics, field placements, and simulation courses — rather than purely doctrinal lecture courses — are getting repeated exposure to the kind of applied legal reasoning the bar exam (and, increasingly, the NextGen bar format) tests.
It's also worth noting where Duquesne's graduates actually practice: Pennsylvania is listed as the school's largest employment jurisdiction, and government and public-interest placements together account for roughly 24% of the class (13.2% government, 10.5% public interest), with another 8 graduates going into federal or state/local clerkships. A class that disproportionately stays in-state and enters practice areas with direct exposure to Pennsylvania procedure and substantive law is, structurally, a class with strong incentive and repeated occasion to master the Pennsylvania-specific material tested on the bar — though the pack doesn't isolate this as a stated cause of the pass-rate gap, only as a fact about where the class lands.
What this means for a prospective applicant
If your plan is to practice in Pennsylvania, Duquesne's first-time and ultimate bar numbers are a directly relevant data point: they describe outcomes for the exact population (Pennsylvania test-takers) you would be joining. If you plan to practice in a different state, remember that Pennsylvania's bar passage rate says nothing about how Duquesne graduates perform on other states' exams — that data isn't in the pack, and shouldn't be assumed. As with any law school's bar numbers, prospective students should confirm current-cycle figures directly with the school before relying on them, since bar administrations, formats (including the shift toward NextGen in some jurisdictions), and pass-rate reporting periods change year to year.
Duquesne's entering class posts an LSAT range of 155 at the 25th percentile, 157 at the median, and 160 at the 75th percentile, paired with GPAs of 3.35, 3.62, and 3.85 at the same three points. These medians are planning anchors, not predictions: a 157 LSAT places you at the statistical center of Duquesne's admitted class, a 160 places you above three-quarters of your future classmates, and a 155 places you at the boundary where a quarter of the class scored lower. The same logic applies to GPA — a 3.62 is the class midpoint, and undergraduate performance above 3.85 is in the top quarter of the incoming cohort.
Duquesne received 1,432 applications and extended 619 offers for its most recent entering class, an acceptance rate of 43.23%. The class that resulted totals 184 students, split between 154 in the full-time day program and 30 in Duquesne's part-time day and evening divisions — a structure that traces back to the school's 1911 founding as an evening program for students balancing work and law study. That part-time option remains a meaningful piece of the class composition today, not a historical footnote.
How scholarships track your numbers
Duquesne reports that 96% of students receive some form of grant aid, with a median full-time grant of $30,000 — roughly half of the $58,898 annual tuition figure in the pack. Aid isn't distributed evenly, though: the pack shows 53% of the class receiving less than half-tuition awards, 27% receiving between half and full tuition, and 16% receiving full-tuition awards. That spread means the difference between landing near the 25th percentile (155/3.35) and landing at or above the median (157/3.62) or 75th percentile (160/3.85) can correspond to a real difference in which of those three award bands you fall into, though the pack does not publish a school-specific formula linking exact numbers to exact award tiers. For a full walkthrough of how to read and negotiate scholarship offers generally, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
What the conditional-scholarship data does (and doesn't) show
The pack includes reporting fields for conditional-scholarship retention across the 2022-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25 entering classes, but every value in those fields is zero or unreported. That most plausibly means Duquesne did not have students on conditional scholarships losing them in those years, or the school does not publicly break this out further — the pack does not specify which. Either way, this guide won't speculate: applicants weighing a conditional award at Duquesne should ask the admissions office directly what GPA benchmark, if any, is attached to their specific offer, since that detail isn't resolvable from the data available here.
Reading your own numbers against this band
If your LSAT and GPA sit at or above Duquesne's 75th percentile marks (160 / 3.85), you're in the top quarter of Duquesne's entering-class numbers on both metrics. If you're below the 25th percentile on both measures, it's worth reviewing your full application — writing, resume, addenda — since Duquesne's 43.23% acceptance rate indicates a majority of applicants are not admitted, and softer numbers put more weight on the rest of the file. Neither position is a guarantee of an outcome in either direction; these are descriptive comparisons to Duquesne's own published class profile, not odds of admission.
For the class reflected in these outcomes, a Duquesne law degree functions primarily as a Pennsylvania credential: the school's own reporting identifies Pennsylvania as the largest single category of employment for its graduates, and its bar-passage numbers are built around the Pennsylvania exam specifically. If your goal is to practice in or around Pittsburgh, or elsewhere in the Commonwealth, this is the core data to weigh; if your goal is a national Big Law career from day one, the numbers below should be read with clear eyes.
Across the reporting cohort, 89.66% of Duquesne graduates passed the bar exam on their first attempt, against a state average of 79.97% — meaning Duquesne's first-time takers outperformed the statewide average for ABA-approved school graduates by close to 10 points. The two-year ultimate pass rate for the class is reported at 95.12%, indicating that the large majority of graduates who don't clear the bar on the first attempt do so on a second try. Looking specifically at the 2024 graduating class taking the Pennsylvania bar for the first time, 120 of 135 passed, an 88.89% rate, compared with an 80.25% statewide average that year. The two figures (89.66% vs. 88.89%) come from slightly different reporting cuts, but both tell the same story: Duquesne graduates have consistently cleared the Pennsylvania bar at a meaningfully higher rate than their statewide peers.
Of 152 total graduates in the reporting class, 89.5% were employed in full-time, long-term jobs that either required bar passage or were JD-advantage positions — the standard measure of a law degree translating into a law-related career. The distribution across employer types skews toward smaller and mid-sized firms rather than the largest national firms:
That means roughly a third of the graduating class (55 of 152) went into firms of 25 attorneys or fewer — the kind of local and regional practice that has historically anchored Duquesne's identity as a Pittsburgh law school. The 8 graduates who landed at firms of 501 or more attorneys represent 5.3% of the class, a small but real Big Law placement that shows the door isn't closed, even if it isn't the school's central outcome.
Yes, and at a combined rate that rivals its private-firm placement. Twenty graduates (13.2%) went into government positions and another 16 (10.5%) into public interest roles, together accounting for nearly a quarter of the class. Eight graduates secured clerkships — 3 federal and 5 state or local — putting judicial clerkships within reach for a meaningful, if modest, slice of each class. A further 6 graduates entered business and industry roles, the JD-advantage track for graduates who use the degree outside of traditional practice.
The honest read is that Duquesne functions as a strong regional law school with a real, if numerically small, Big Law pipeline. If your priority is passing the Pennsylvania bar and building a practice in Pittsburgh or elsewhere in the Commonwealth, the above-average bar pass rate and the concentration of graduates in Pennsylvania firms, government offices, and public interest organizations are directly relevant to you. If your priority is a guaranteed run at a 501+-attorney firm, the 5.3% Big Law placement rate means that outcome went to a small subset of each class, not a majority, and you should weigh that against your own targets and any scholarship or debt trade-offs before enrolling. The pack does not report the specific firms, agencies, or clerkship courts involved, so applicants who need that granularity should ask the admissions or career services office directly.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
The $50 million gift from alumnus Thomas R. Kline, announced in September 2022, is the largest single donation in Duquesne University's history, and it's why the law school now carries his name. Beyond the naming rights, the concrete, documented change is physical and institutional: renovations to Edward J. Hanley Hall, originally constructed in 1981-1982, were completed and rededicated in April 2024, giving the school an updated home roughly four decades after Hanley Hall first opened.
It extends into at least one academic program: the school's energy and environmental law journal is now named Joule: Duquesne Kline Energy & Environmental Law Journal, tying the Kline name to student scholarship as well as physical infrastructure. Beyond the journal naming and the Hanley Hall renovation, the data pack does not specify additional uses of the gift — for example, it does not break out how much of the $50 million went to scholarships, faculty endowments, clinical funding, or other programming. Prospective students who want that level of detail should ask the school directly rather than assume a philanthropic gift of this size automatically expands financial aid or faculty hiring.
The Kline gift is part of a recognizable pattern at this school: major facilities and programs at Duquesne Law have repeatedly been renamed or created through alumni philanthropy rather than university general funds. The clinical program, established in 1995 as the Hugo L. Black Law Clinic, was renamed the Tribone Center for Clinical Legal Education in 2013 after a gift from alumnus Thomas R. Tribone, and that center remains located near downtown Pittsburgh's courts and government offices. Seen alongside the Tribone naming a decade earlier, the 2022 Kline gift continues a trajectory in which the school's most visible assets — its building and at least one of its journals — bear the names of alumni donors rather than of founding deans or historical benefactors from outside the Duquesne community.
Practically, the gift signals that the school's core teaching building has been recently renovated (as of the April 2024 rededication) rather than that it is an old, unmodernized facility — a fact worth knowing if physical infrastructure matters to your decision. It does not, based on what's in the record here, mean a documented change in scholarship funding, class size, or curriculum; those figures should be evaluated on their own separately reported terms rather than assumed to have shifted because of the naming gift.
Duquesne's clinical program, now called the Tribone Center for Clinical Legal Education, is built around a location near downtown Pittsburgh's courts and government offices, and it has been part of the school since 1995, when it launched as the Hugo L. Black Law Clinic. The center took its current name in 2013 after a gift from alumnus Thomas R. Tribone, and that renaming reflects a deepened commitment to hands-on legal work rather than a rebrand alone.
In practice, clinical work at Duquesne is only one piece of a broader experiential curriculum. The school reports 59 clinic seats available with 46 filled, alongside 97 filled field placements and 343 filled simulation-course slots, plus five co-curricular offerings. That mix means most students doing applied legal work at Duquesne are doing it through a field placement or a simulation course rather than a live clinic seat — worth knowing if a clinic specifically is the draw, since seats are the most limited of the three tracks.
Where does that training lead? Among the 152 graduates in the reporting class, 20 (13.2%) went into government roles and 16 (10.5%) into public interest work, categories that plausibly draw on the kind of court- and agency-adjacent experience the Tribone Center is positioned to provide given its downtown Pittsburgh location. Clerkships add another eight graduates — three federal, five state or local. Altogether, 89.5% of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term positions that were bar-required or J.D.-advantage, a figure that reflects the full class outcome, not just those tied to clinical training specifically.
What the pack does not report is a roster of individual clinic subject areas (family law, elder law, criminal defense, and similar labels common at other schools' clinical programs) or faculty supervisors by name, so applicants who need clinic-by-clinic detail should confirm current offerings directly with the school before assuming a particular practice area is covered.
Yes — Duquesne still runs a part-time evening J.D. today, a direct descendant of the program it opened in 1911 as an evening-only law school for working students in downtown Pittsburgh. Classes first met in the George Building starting September 25, 1911, and the school shifted fully to evening hours (6-8 p.m.) by 1914, a schedule built around students who held daytime jobs.
That structure changed over time — day classes were added in 1958 alongside a move to Rockwell Hall, the school gained ABA approval in 1960, and it joined the AALS in 1964 — but the evening option never disappeared. Duquesne's current catalog still includes a full-time day J.D., a part-time day J.D., and a part-time evening J.D. side by side.
The part-time track remains a meaningful share of the school: of 184 total students in the reporting class, 30 are part-time against 154 full-time. Part-time students also pay a lower annual rate ($45,264) than full-time tuition ($58,898), a structural difference tied to the credit load rather than a discount, since part-time students take fewer credits per year and typically finish over a longer timeline. For someone weighing whether to keep working while earning a J.D., Duquesne's evening option is not a modern add-on — it is the school's founding format, still operating well over a century later.
Duquesne's joint-degree lineup is aimed at students who already know a second field they want to pair with law: the school offers joint J.D. programs combined with graduate study in business, environmental science, healthcare, philosophy, and divinity. That last pairing is a natural fit for a private Catholic university.
The environmental science joint degree also connects to a specific in-house outlet: Duquesne publishes Joule, the Duquesne Kline Energy & Environmental Law Journal, alongside the flagship Duquesne Law Review, giving students in that track a journal aligned with their subject area rather than only general-interest scholarship.
Beyond joint degrees, the school also runs an LL.M. for foreign-trained lawyers and summer study-abroad programs in Germany, France, Dublin, and Belfast — relevant for J.D. students who want an international law credential or a short-term study-abroad experience layered onto the domestic degree, though the pack does not specify credit structures, GPA requirements, or added time-to-degree for any joint program, so applicants interested in a specific combination should confirm program mechanics directly with admissions.
The number that matters most is where your score falls relative to Duquesne's own LSAT range: the school's 25th/50th/75th percentiles are 155/157/160, with GPA percentiles of 3.35/3.62/3.85. A 157 puts you at Duquesne's median, a 160 at its 75th percentile, and a 155 at its 25th — these are planning anchors for where you sit in the applicant pool, not predictions of an admission outcome or a specific scholarship award.
That range matters for money as much as for admission. Duquesne reports that 96% of students receive some grant aid, with a 50th-percentile full-time grant of $30,000 — a meaningful offset against $58,898 in annual full-time tuition. But aid is banded unevenly: 53% of grant recipients get less than half tuition covered, 27% get between half and full tuition, and only 16% get a full-tuition award. In practical terms, a score above the 75th-percentile mark of 160, paired with a GPA near or above 3.85, places an applicant in the top band of Duquesne's published LSAT/GPA range — though the school's own admissions office is the only reliable source for how a specific number translates into a specific offer in a given cycle.
On the test itself: as of the 2025-26 cycle, the LSAT is scored 120-180 using two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section (Logic Games were removed from the format in August 2024), plus a separate unscored Argumentative Writing sample submitted online. Schools consider your highest score, so a retake after focused preparation with official practice material is a standard strategy for closing the gap between a 25th-percentile score and Duquesne's median or 75th-percentile mark. For the mechanics of building an LSAT study plan, see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat; for how to time an application around scholarship deadlines, see /law-school-application-timeline; and for how to approach a scholarship offer once it arrives, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
Duquesne offered admission to 619 of 1,432 applicants for its most recent entering class, a 43.23% acceptance rate, and enrolled 184 students (154 full-time, 30 part-time). That acceptance rate places Duquesne among the more accessible ABA-approved programs, but "accessible" does not mean unselective — it means the file review rewards a coherent, well-supported application more than it punishes a single soft data point.
The numbers that matter most for self-assessment are the school's published 25th/50th/75th percentiles: an LSAT of 155/157/160 and an undergraduate GPA of 3.35/3.62/3.85. Use these as planning anchors, not odds. A 157 LSAT and 3.62 GPA sit at Duquesne's medians, meaning roughly half of an admitted class typically scores above that mark and half below it on each metric — not that a given applicant with those numbers has any specific chance of admission. A 160 LSAT sits at the 75th percentile, a signal of relative strength on that axis alone; a 155 sits at the 25th percentile, meaning a substantial share of admits score below it too. Because GPA and LSAT are evaluated together with the rest of a file (personal statement, letters, addenda, work experience), a below-median number on one axis is routinely offset by strength elsewhere — that is precisely why medians are ranges, not cutoffs.
On the process itself, the pack does not report Duquesne's current application deadline, fee, or accepted testing formats, so verify those directly on the school's admissions page before you build a timeline — do not assume rolling deadlines or fee waivers without confirming them. What is stable across schools, including Duquesne, is the broader mechanics of putting together a competitive file: LSAT preparation timelines, when to apply within a rolling cycle, and how to sequence letters of recommendation. For the generic mechanics of test preparation and application sequencing, see the LSAT prep and application timeline guides (/how-to-study-for-the-lsat, /law-school-application-timeline); apply those general principles against Duquesne's own median bands above rather than a generic "good LSAT" benchmark, since a score that is competitive at one school may be well above or below median at another.
Worth noting for anyone considering the part-time route: Duquesne enrolled 30 part-time students alongside 154 full-time students in its most recent class, reflecting the school's long-running evening division. If you are weighing full-time versus part-time day or evening tracks, factor in that these divisions typically draw applicants with different work and life circumstances, which can shape how a file is read relative to the same published medians.
Most admitted students at Duquesne receive some scholarship money — 96% of the entering class did — but the size of that award varies enormously, and that variance is the actual financial decision you're making. The median full-time grant is $30,000 a year, which covers roughly half of Duquesne's $58,898 annual tuition (before the additional $1,220 in fees). Against a total estimated cost of attendance of $84,436 a year — tuition, fees, and an off-campus living estimate of $24,318 — a median grant still leaves a substantial gap to be filled by loans, savings, or other aid.
The distribution around that median matters more than the median itself. Of students receiving grants, 53% get an award covering less than half of tuition, 27% land in the half-to-full-tuition band, and 16% receive a full-tuition scholarship. In practical terms: a majority of aid recipients are in the smaller-award tier, and only about one in six is fully covered. Before you commit, ask where your specific offer sits in that distribution — a $10,000 award and a $30,000 award are both "grants," but they represent very different four-year (or three-year, for full-time students) financial pictures once you multiply the gap by three years of cost of attendance.
On conditional scholarships — awards that require maintaining a minimum GPA to keep the money — the data pack does not report Duquesne's retention figures (the entering and reduced-award counts for the last three cycles are not publicly broken out in this compilation). That is a real gap, not a reassurance: many law schools attach GPA floors to first-year scholarships, and a non-trivial share of recipients nationally lose part or all of a conditional award after year one because law school grading curves make maintaining a high GPA harder than undergraduate work often was. Ask Duquesne admissions directly, in writing, whether your specific offer carries a GPA condition, what that condition is, and what percentage of similarly-conditioned students historically kept their award — if the school won't or can't answer that last question, treat the award as less secure than its headline number suggests.
Finally, remember that a scholarship offer is frequently a starting point, not a final number. Schools with meaningful gaps between their median grant and their full-tuition band sometimes have room to reconsider an offer when presented with a competing offer or updated circumstances. For the general mechanics of that conversation — what to ask for, how to frame a competing offer, and when renegotiation is realistic — see the scholarship negotiation guide (/law-school-scholarship-negotiation), and apply it against Duquesne's own bands above rather than assuming a generic playbook translates one-to-one.
If your target is practicing law in Pennsylvania — and Pittsburgh specifically — Duquesne's numbers tell a locally-focused story worth weighing carefully against its roughly $84,436 estimated annual cost of attendance. The school's largest reported employment category for graduates is Pennsylvania itself, and its first-time bar pass rate of 89.66% (state-reported first-time pass data also shows 120 of 135 first-time Pennsylvania takers passing, 88.89%) runs well ahead of the statewide average for ABA-approved graduates, reported at 79.97%. The two-year ultimate bar passage rate reaches 95.12%. For a school whose stated identity centers on the Pittsburgh legal market, an above-average local bar outcome is a genuinely relevant data point, not a generic credential.
Employment outcomes reinforce that regional framing. Among recent graduates, 89.5% landed in jobs requiring bar passage or classified as JD-advantage. But the composition of those jobs matters for financial planning: only 5.3% (8 of 152 graduates) went to firms of 501+ attorneys — the "Big Law" tier associated with the roughly $215,000 starting-salary peak that dominates national law-salary headlines. The much larger shares went to smaller firms (38 graduates at firms of 1-10 attorneys, 17 at 11-25), government (13.2%), and public interest (10.5%), with a handful of federal (3) and state/local (5) clerkships. In plain terms: most Duquesne graduates are not entering the compensation tier that makes six-figure debt easy to absorb quickly — they're entering the much larger, much more variable-salary segment of the legal market that includes small firms, government, and public interest work.
That composition should directly shape how you think about financing. As of the 2025-26 federal loan rules (verify current terms before you borrow), Direct Unsubsidized loans for graduate/professional students are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 in aggregate, with Grad PLUS eliminated for new borrowers. Duquesne's annual cost of roughly $84,436 exceeds that $50,000 federal annual cap by a wide margin, meaning a student without a large scholarship will need private loans, savings, or family support to close the gap — a shortfall that has to be underwritten at whatever rate a private lender offers, generally on less favorable terms than federal loans.
For the roughly one-quarter of the class heading into government or public interest work, Public Service Loan Forgiveness remains statutorily intact and can meaningfully change the math — but only for borrowers who affirmatively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) rather than defaulting into the new Standard Plan, which earns zero PSLF credit. A Duquesne graduate taking a government or nonprofit job in Pennsylvania at a modest public-sector salary should model RAP and the ten-year PSLF timeline explicitly rather than assuming standard repayment will be manageable on that income. Graduates headed to smaller firms — the largest single destination in Duquesne's outcomes — should instead model standard repayment against realistic small-firm starting salaries, which run well below the Big Law peak and vary significantly by practice area and firm size.
Put together: Duquesne's case for "worth it" is strongest for an applicant specifically targeting the Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania market, comfortable with a small-firm, government, or public-interest trajectory rather than a Big Law one, and who has secured a scholarship that meaningfully closes the gap between the $30,000 median grant and the roughly $84,000 annual cost. Without a strong scholarship, the arithmetic of borrowing above the federal cap to fund a degree whose largest outcomes lie outside the highest-paying tier of the profession deserves a hard look before enrolling. For the general framework behind that calculation — how to weigh sticker cost, likely salary, and loan terms against each other — see the loans/PSLF guide and the broader is-law-school-worth-it framework (/law-school-loans-and-pslf, /is-law-school-worth-it), and run the numbers using Duquesne's own figures above rather than national averages.