/ Cory Doctorow / 12:30 pm Wed Mar 21, 2012

US law-school bubble pops

Writing in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann describes the popping of the "law school bubble," which saw large numbers of law-school enrollees who hoped to graduate into six-figure salaries but instead are facing "six figures of crushing debt and murky career prospects."

These new statistics are the latest evidence that young Americans are getting the hint that the market for lawyers is perhaps not what it once was. It wouldn't matter that fewer people were taking the LSAT if the same number of young folks were ultimately showing up for their first year of law school each fall. But that total seems to be dropping, too. According to the LSAC, the number of students who accepted admission to a law school dropped 8 percent last year, from 49,700, to 45,617 -- the smallest incoming class since at least 2002. (Last year's number isn't published on the Council's website yet, but was provided to me by a spokeswoman). The number of applications also dropped dramatically, which could force law schools to ease up on their mind bogglingly expensive tuition.

One might argue that the drop-offs in test takers and applicants are just the result of an improving economy. After all, more people go to law school when the broader job market is weak. But America's slowly brightening employment picture doesn't seem like a likely cause in this instance. At the AmLaw Daily, Matt Leichter forecasts the size of this year's final applicant pool per law school, and compares it to the trend in the United States' employment to population ratio. When this few people are working, you be expecting to see an increase in law school applications.

Pop! Goes the Law School Bubble (via MeFi)

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  5. I wouldn’t call the bubble “burst” just yet. 44.5K applicants is probably plenty enough for the overwhelming number of law schools to keep their admissions percentage low enough to charge a “premium” to those admitted. After all, if you don’t want the seat, four other people do . . .

    Frankly it would be much better for the profession in the Big Law pay structure had taken a bigger hit. That draws the students to the law schools, inflates professorial pay, etc. etc.

    1. Perhaps the ABA will start crying about how there are so few qualified lawyers being graduated compared to the demand… and we all know where this story goes.

  6. For an interesting fictional representation of the decrease in law jobs, I recommend watching The Good Wife season one.  There’s an interesting scene where Cary Agos (played by Matt Czuchry) walks into a bar, after being laid off his job, despite being very successful and very well qualified, to find a number of his friends from the usual prestigious law schools (Yale, Harvard etc.) who, having no success in the job hunt, simply resort to loitering around successful lawyers, hoping to make a random connection.  (Great show, btw)

    I forget if it was the NYT or the NY Magazine that had an article claiming that the percentage of lawyers hired for actual partner positions has almost been halved over recent years, partially due to competition and partially due to increasingly sophisticated search programs which enable firms to dramatically cut down their costs for document trawling.  In a different decade I might have seriously considered entering law school; but as I am not cut out for working 80-hour weeks in cut-throat competition with dozens of others for a lottery-system hiring process, I have avoided or postponed the venture.  It would seem many others have done similarly.

  7. Law school is terrible, and it just leads to an unpleasant job. Google your state’s law code. Read it for 50 hours each week for a month. If you enjoy that, by all means, go to law school! That’s pretty much all you will ever do, in law school and pretty much the rest of your career. Reading laws and interpreting them in the “right” way. That and deal with grumpy, sad, jaded and/or belligerent people who don’t want to see you and probably won’t show up to court or listen to your sound advice. (*sigh*…I dropped out, so you might think I am one of the jaded, but it is true.)

    1. Meh. The job actually does change the longer you are in it. But that is a pretty fair characterization of  being a new associate.

  8. I graduated from a top-25 law school in 2008. Luckily, I was on a full scholarship and found a job immediately, but lots of my classmates did not, and the ones that did were soon laid off or are under employed (can you imagine going to school for 8 years only to have an hourly job?). Just from a job prospects stand point, I would tell anyone who cannot get into a law school ranked higher than 50 to not go period, and anyone who gets in somewhere better to seriously consider other options unless tuition is free or cheap.

    The worst part of the job is not the hours or the work–it’s the stress. This depends on what area you practice in, but I’m a litigator, and think about it this way: my job is getting paid to deal with what may be the worst thing to ever happen to my client, with their livelihood, reputation, business, etc. on the line. You are paid to be an emotional beast of burden. The highs are high, but the lows are low and the base line is much closer to the bottom.

    I miss mindlessly stocking the cooler at the gas station when I was in high school.

    1. “can you imagine going to school for 8 years only to have an hourly job?”

      Actually many many people can nowadays. How did you get 8; I  was under the impression most law schools were 3 years on top of a undergrad degree?

      1. Typo. Yes, seven years. I don’t know many people attaining terminal degrees working for 10 bucks an hour in a position that requires state licensure.

    2. I miss mindlessly stocking the cooler at the gas station when I was in high school.

      Point taken, but I bet you don’t miss what the station’s owner paid you.

      Is the higher pay now much compensation, as it were, for the miseries you now endure? (Serious question.)

      1. Well, of course it is. That was just my existentialism kicking in. However, the older I get the more I realized that in my youth I chose striving for material success for the sake of material success, and damn the misery. Law school was mostly a collection of very intelligent individuals with no proper direction, and law school was just what was “next;” what would pay the bills until their startup/novel/album/etc. got off the ground. Suddenly, it’s years later and you realize you wasted your college life preparing the backup plan and not the plan itself, and you hate the backup plan.

        There are legal jobs out there, they just are not all the $160,000 starting salary jobs people took out massive debt chasing and would never have gone to law school if those jobs were the end game.

    3. You know, like so many things about being an attorney, the stress ebbs as well. Or it kills you. But assuming it doesn’t kill you, you learn to compartmentalize better, stop having dreams about missing deadlines etc. Although the context is different, it gets better is apt here as well.

  9. As a law professor for over twenty-five years, let me simply say that this is long overdue.  There have been too many law schools turning out too many lawyers. Law schools are supported by  students taking out debt yet the professors they support with this debt are mostly busy writing law review articles that only other law professors read.   These academics  hold the legal profession and most of their students in a kind of genteel disdain.  Maybe this will be a wake up call.  

    1. Interesting. As an empowered person in the position of “law professor” for over twenty-five years, what have you been doing to ameliorate these deceptive and abusive conditions? Aside, that is, from rather pointlessly (or self-servingly) writing law review articles that only other law professors read?

    2. There are certainly too many law schools and too many lawyers, and legal academia is probably 90% perpetual motion. However, that is the very reason your wake up call is probably not going to happen. The ABA, LSAC, and the rest are not simply going to drop accreditation from half the law schools and topple their own tower. Let’s face it: if you want to be a lawyer, you get into some law school, and that’s a lot of money to academia. If you want to be a doctor, a job our profession was once held in equal stature (which now seems like a sick joke), you don’t just bomb the MCAT and pay your way into Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at $50,000 a year. Law school needs to be a lot more like medical school, including culling a lot of the schools and proactively protecting those already licensed from herds of new lawyers.

    3. Or not so genteel.

      On the other hand, who would write articles about how the law *should* be if we didn’t have law professors?

  10. Is this sort of like the way the business schools of the world generate hordes of people with massive student loan debt to fill crappy entry-level positions that require none of the training they paid for?

  11. I would love to see an analysis that compiled the following:
    -cost of an education in fields X/Y/Z
    -expected income in fields X/Y/Z
    -related to the above would be number of jobs per graduate in that field

    In the end – what is the career opportunity math that will result in an acceptable debt/LIKELY income ratio? 

    I have watched the film industry go from tough to ludicrous in the last decade – WAY WAY WAY too many people trying to get into the business, which means the pay rate goes way down while the expectations of competency go way up – who wins in that situation?

    The employers.

    And the schools that make false/misleading promises about the viability of a degree in that field.

    -mike curtis

  12. IMO it’s not just law school, and while I personally think lawyers had it coming more than anyone else, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem.

    Professional fields as a whole are experiencing a bubble… while at the same time those with the power within these fields to expand and create jobs are saying there aren’t enough qualified people to expand. Yet it’s a similar story (if not perhaps quite as desperate) everywhere else – sciences, medicine, whatever (the one exception being engineering other than IT-type stuff) – several people are graduating with expensive degrees for each relevant position available.

    I don’t claim to know the solution, or even really understand why this problem exists, but it’s so unbelievably frustrating.

    In order for things to work out in today’s economic environment, people need to be discouraged from studying advanced topics. We shouldn’t have campaigns to get kids interested in science, for example, because very few kids who grow up and study science in college will be able to find jobs in science.

    This is fundamentally wrong, and needs to be addressed from the top down in all professions. Which means, among other things, that “job creators” need to earn that title, or be forced to redistribute their wealth – ideally into basic science research at universities :)

  13. I wonder which students are deciding not to go to law school.  Were they the least qualified applicants (and would thus have populated the lowest-ranking schools)?   Or was the reduction in numbers equal across the various strength of applicants?  Essentially, are we weeding out weak lawyers and weak law schools? I doubt the admissions scene will change at the very top schools, where the VAST majority of big firm hiring happens. 
     
    In my opinion, big firms have been overpaying first-years by at least double for a long time.  Law firms tend to make bad management decisions (incentives, work/life balance, mentoring, etc.) because they are run by lawyers who don’t have the knowledge, time or desire to run a business.  (FWIW, I am a young associate at a big firm from a top school.)

  14. This was the law review article that convinced me my suspicions were correct and that the rewards I would reap from an excellent law school record would not be worth the effort required to obtain such results.  I slogged through my top 50ish law school on a partial scholarship, got my degree with mediocre grades, and now work in a tangentially related field making a good living and working an average of 40 hours a week. I won’t say my work is my passion, but I don’t dread coming in, and I have enough time to be a good husband and pursue hobbies that I find incredibly fulfilling.  Some might call me lazy, but I’m enjoying my life in a way I never did in law school or during the few years I was practicing.

    http://www.averyindex.com/happy_healthy_ethical.php

    1. That’s a good outcome and a good attitude. What too few new grads get is that top 50 law school with average grades means is that you are absolutely ineligible for the $160K starting that someone dangled in front of you. Expectations and goals are crucial in staying happy.

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