Law School Applications Continue to Fall

Apparently more college age individuals are waking up to what many attorneys of many years have known for years:  The legal profession sucks.  High stress, much lower pay than most people assume, and horrible hours are the norm in private practice.  Not that government positions and in-house positions are sweetness and light either.  All of which explains why attorneys have among the highest alcohol and drug abuse problems and a high suicide rate.  As a consequence, especially given the insanely high expense of going to law school, applications to law schools are down for the third year in a row.  The Washington Post looks at this trend.  Here are highlights:

The number of people applying to U.S. law schools dropped nationwide for the third year in a row, prompting some law schools to slash the size of their entering classes.

As of May 17, about 55,760 people had applied to American Bar Association-accredited law schools for the 2013-14 school year — down 13.4 percent from 2012, according to data compiled by the Law School Admission Council.

Law school enrollment is also trending downward, with 48,700 people entering their first year of law school in fall 2011 — 7 percent below the previous year, and the first significant decline in a decade. The council has yet to compile nationwide enrollment data for fall 2012.

Last fall, George Washington University Law School cut its number of first-year law students from 474 to 398, the smallest in a decade and the second year in a row the school reduced its class size.

The drop in applications follows a period in which too many new lawyers chased too few jobs. The 2008 economic collapse forced many of the nation’s largest law firms to dramatically reduce the number of first-year lawyers they hired in 2009 and 2010. At the same time, law school enrollment continued to climb — hitting a 10-year high of 52,500 in fall 2010 — leading to the lowest levels of employment for new graduates since 1996, a growing proportion of them carrying loans of $120,000 or more.

Cornblatt said growing concerns about the legal job market and law school debt are driving away less-serious potential applicants who a few years ago might have been eager to enter law school to weather the recession.

“There’s been so much noise about the legal job market and how tough it is, whether it’s worth the tuition and borrowing all that money,” he said. “That group of people who weren’t as committed just aren’t applying now. . . . The rest of world won’t weep over fewer people wanting to be lawyers, but for people like me who do admissions, it creates challenges. There are fewer top applicants and the same number of law schools fighting over a smaller pool of highly qualified applicants than four years ago.”

 Hopefully, the trend continues.  There are far too many young attorneys fighting over jobs and willing to stretch the ethical rules to pander to clients.  It's not a pretty picture.