I can’t see the move to the new Cravath scale changing law school admission numbers much. Even when associates started at 160k, the question for prospective law students was never “are BigLawyers sufficiently paid,” it was “how likely am I to become a BigLawyer?” That hasn’t changed any.
^Yes, I came to say this. BigLaw lawyers already make enough to pay off law school loans, although an extra $20,000 a year can’t hurt. It’s just that students who go to law schools below the top 25 (and really, the top 15) are exceedingly unlikely to get BigLaw jobs, and the further down the list they go the more unlikely they are to make that kind of money.
Besides, there’s a social pressure aspect, too. When I went to college in 2004, technology and big data weren’t really big things yet, so the ‘sexy’ coveted jobs that ambitious young people wanted were in law and finance, and real estate to a certain extent. After the recession made law and finance and real estate jobs less appealing, technology and big data rose. Even if law does recover some of its remunerative properties it won’t bounce back to pre-recession levels because a law career doesn’t have the same kind of hot cachet it used to. I volunteer teach high school students in a college access program and when I ask them what they want to do, hardly any of them say law anymore, but half of them say computer science or engineering. When I and one of my co-instructors (a lawyer) told them that law used to be the technology careers of our day and we both wanted to be lawyers in college, they made faces at us. LOL.