Trends in law school admission v. employment

[rmd]

I would be interested in people's comments on this short article: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/10/irresponsibility-of-law-schools.html  Thanks.

[Anne]

A few initial thoughts:

1. Law schools are businesses. They saw the panic caused by the recession, and responded by taking advantage of it and taking in oodles of scared people (and their tuition dollars). Was it noble? Not at all. Was it a smart business move on their end? Monetarily, yes. Morally? No. Did it harm their reputation? For those who care enough to look, yes. Unfortunately, most law applicants don't really do that much soul-searching or morality-searching when they apply to law school, so that little tidbit is either non-existent to them, or simply lost.

2. It's easy to demonize law schools, but I'm sure grad schools, business schools, and colleges (2- and 4-year) all saw a similar surge, even as jobs went down dramatically. Business schools probably to a lesser extent (since people saw rich MBA's as the source of all the country's financial woes), but I can imagine they still saw an increase.

What I actually would be most interested to know would be why these legal jobs are decreasing, and how that will affect the legal profession as a whole. I know that the billable hour is slowly going the way of the dinosaurs (as are permanent job offers for summer associates). but also wonder what else this slowly decreasing harbinger brings. 

Good article and definitely interesting graphics, though, rmd. Thanks for that!

[LSAT Eliminator]

Good article, and it raises an interesting question. However, almost anything can be shown with simple graphs, reminding one of the adage, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics." With that in mind, there are several things I don't see addressed:

1.  There are more law schools now than there were in the 1990s.

Part of the reason there are more law students is that a number of new law schools have opened up over the past 20 years. So, to make a blanket claim that "Law schools thus responded to the worst recession in the legal market in at least two decades by letting in more law students" is a bit disingenuous when there are simply more schools. Yes, they let in more students overall, but it wasn't that every school suddenly ballooned in class size (although, I'd be interested in seeing those statistics added to the discussion).


2. There's a demand issue in play here

The point above aside, simply blaming the law schools for the increase in students misses the point that application numbers are up. More people took the LSAT, and more people applied to law schools as the past 20 years progressed. People want to attend law school, and the job of a school is to provide educational opportunities and a good education. What happens thereafter isn't something that should be entirely their responsibility or fault. In other words, if what is under discussion is even an issue, then the people applying bear some of the responsibility as well.


3. What happens today doesn't necessarily reflect what happens in three years

Historically, during recessions, applications and student numbers increase as people seek to ride out the recession in school. Then, several years later they exit, hopefully to a new, improved job market. So, although numbers at law schools have surged during the recession, that doesn't necessarily constitute a problem if the legal picture changes in the next several years. Of course, that's a totally different issue, and who knows what happens there!


Anyway, the author is clearly attempting to raise a question that, from the graphs, is a reasonable question to ask. I just think there are more factors in play than "blame all law schools."

[Ashley O]

The bottom chart is for all legal employees, lawyers and non-lawyers. I wonder what happened internally with those numbers? Did they cut support staff dramatically, so that non-lawyers really dropped but lawyers didn't drop as much? Or was it major cuts across the board?

More info needed before drawing such a broad conclusion, I think.

[Jack Daws]

I think this is just another indication that all the schools care about is money. With budget cuts happening everywhere, schools know that more students = more tuition, and the best way to make up a shortfall of $$ is to admit more people.

Maybe Harvard will open their doors wide enough to let me in

[Anne]

I just think there are more factors in play than "blame all law schools."

Exactly. It's easy to want to blame the law schools (and they're certainly not innocent), but they're not the WHOLE problem. Applicant expectations, current law student expectations. the passive stance of the ABA on the ever-increasing number of schools...there are a lot more factors at play here than just the law schools taking in more students. The whole perspective of what a legal education is supposed to be and what a lawyer is supposed to do (and how much anyone should pay for a J.D.) needs to change, and it won't happen just because law schools "accept the blame" or change the way they operate (even if it would go a long way towards ameliorating the problem).