Some interesting analysis from the ABA journal:
….figures suggest that enrollments are coming closer to matching the Bureau of Labor Statistics job projections, which project that the economy can absorb about 22,000 new lawyers a year through the year 2020. That’s good for prospective students, he says, who will have more reason to think that a law degree will translate into the career they intended. The decline in enrollments also creates revenue pressures that will force law schools to look for ways to provide a more affordable legal education.
On the negative side, the enrollment figures are still 20 to 25 percent higher than the projected market for new jobs requiring or preferring a law degree, he says. And other data suggests that some schools are maintaining enrollments as high as they are by accepting students with lesser credentials, which could have negative long-term implications for the legal profession.
David Yellen, dean of Loyola University of Chicago School of Law, says while the figures are not surprising, it is “still kind of stunning” to think that law school enrollments have declined nearly 25 percent in three years. “The last time fewer than 40,000 students were enrolled in law school was in 1977,” he says.
Yellen also says that while he thinks 52,000 new law school enrollees a year is too many, we’re now at the point where we might want to ask whether the market correction has gone too far and is being driven as much by negative publicity as anything else (emphasis added).
However, new applications are projected to be down another 10 to 15 percent in the coming year, he says, “so we’re definitely not at the bottom of the cycle yet.”
The enrollment figures come from the questionnaires that ABA-approved law schools file annually with the section. Over the next several months, the section plans to publish more reports about the data, including school-specific information, which will also be posted on the statistics page of the section’s website.
Last updated Dec. 19 to include enrollment figures from 1975.
Filed under: Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Uncategorized | Tagged: ABA, law schools, legal education |
Best Practices for Legal Education 