<p>"First-year enrollment at U.S. law schools plunged this year to levels not seen since the 1970s as students steered away from a career that has left many recent graduates loaded with debt and struggling to find work."</p>
<p>But, that doesn't mean it's going to be easier to get into Harvard or Columbia Law. The lowest tier of schools (where the employment prospects are worst) will likely take the biggest hit from this trend. And some schools are actually expanding their number of seats, according to the article.</p>
<p>Enrollments have been dropping since 2010. It’s a market correction, not a one-off thing. The market can only absorb about 25,000 or 30,000 lawyers a year; add on a few for those going into non-lawyer jobs (business, regulatory work, etc.) and you’re still well short of current enrollment.</p>
<p>Admission to Harvard and Columbia has already gotten easier! As more kids opt for positions in finance and the tech industry, the pool of applicants for the top law schools has lessened too. It’s quite a difference from how it was 20 years ago when law firms were aggressively courting new graduates.</p>
<p>This is a several years long trend, and the schools that are increasing enrollment are also lowering standards, revealing the only reason for the increase in class size is to help the school’s bottom line. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are twice as many JDs graduated annually as there are JD required jobs. Attending a lower ranked school and taking on massive debt is a gigantic risk in the current economic climate.</p>
<p>that’s good. we really don’t need too many more lawyers and hopefully this means that the ones who are still being made will have an easier time finding jobs! i am concerned about the glut of low-tier law schools that are making a lot of lawyers when there aren’t enough legal jobs for them all. you shouldn’t get a JD to work as a stock clerk or a paralegal or something.</p>
<p>My sister’s law office (corporate, multi-city) has cut staff and merged with other offices to reduce their budgets. They are not hiring. They have paralegals doing some of the jobs that junior attorneys and clerks would have done. The students on this website still don’t get it; they assume if they pay $150k for law school, it will come back to them later. Unless they have an “in” like:
a relative or good business associate with a practice,
or graduating from a top 10 school,
the jobs just aren’t there.</p>
<p>Things are dire, but they aren’t that dire. Plenty of people get hired throughout the top 17 or so schools for BigLaw (with a few additional outliers like Fordham). Similarly plenty of top regional schools still effectively place graduates within their regions (though not at BigLaw salaries).</p>
<p>Is this an indication that law is becoming a less and less lucrative job? I still think that law is an amazingly interesting, hard, and rewarding field. Do you think that people view doctors for techies in a better light than lawyers at the moment?</p>
<p>Law has always been a profession with a huge disparity in pay, with popular media publicizing the 160K that entry level associates at biglaw firms would make(always the minority) and ignoring the 45K that a new PD/DA would make. But yes, the biglaw jobs are getting fewer and fewer, so it is less lucrative. Regarding doctors/techies-those professions require skills so far removed from most lawyers that it’s unlikely what’s going on in the legal field is affecting them in any way.</p>
<p>Finance and tech have lured the best and brightest away from medicine and law. I have great respect for tech, and almost none for finance. As a friend of mine who dropped out of law school once said, there aren’t enough billable hours in a day. Those who chase the dollar in any field will likely be dissatisfied. It is important to consider what one “produces” in a profession. Too many merely take a cut and produce little or nothing.</p>
<p>Not sure where you’re getting your info Alma, but clearly not correct about medicine,as medical school applications and enrollments have risen to all-time highs, and it’s ever more difficult to get in([Medical</a> School Applications, Enrollment Rise to Records - Bloomberg](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?))(<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/</a>) . Notwithstanding the desire of many to mention “doctors and lawyers” in the same sentence, they are two entirely different worlds-and not just in the work the respective professions perform. As it stands now, as law school applications/enrollments drop dramatically, medical school applications/enrollments are just the opposite.</p>
<p>does that 11% drop mean in a few years I will hear less ads on the radio with people rapping about slip and falls and car accidents and the number to call. I will miss that.
lawyers should be ashamed that some of their colleagues have ads that go something like this…yo yo yo…you fell in a store then some cash may be on your way…call the greatest coolest baddddest lawyer today…1-800-xxx-xxxx</p>
<p>law schools are often very profitable for universities because of the high student to teacher ratio and the higher tuition. Universities should be responsible and stop asking for so many law schools to be added. The only law lawyers cannot change is the law of supply and demand and the supply is well past what our society demands in most markets.</p>
<p>In other news, I pointed out the other day that a 30K starting salary is not unreasonable for a newly minted lawyer.</p>
<p>Granted, the person I was talking to (who was discussing how another attorney was needed) was embarrassed to offer that much, but agreed that my point was accurate. I kind of think $30K is high. $25K would probably work.</p>
<p>Before one pending attorney who my wife knew finally got a job (and right before he drunk drove himself to death), he had just been offered a $28K job. This was about 18 months ago.</p>
<p>It had taken him two years to get this offer.</p>
<p>These are private practice positions I’m talking about here.</p>
<p>There is no excuse for the high cost of law school tuition. It isn’t cost driven (the cost of providing a law school education is lower than the cost of providing undergraduate education; no labs, etc.) and the average return on investment doesn’t justify it. I’m not surprised that the bubble is bursting; the problem is that there is and will continue to be a need for lawyers. What we’ll have left is only those who come from wealth (and thus can afford to pay for the education without pain) or those who are willing to work on behalf of wealth, which can afford to pay them. </p>
<p>The middle class, once again, will be left holding the bag.</p>
<p>kluge-?
While I agree that there is no excuse for the high cost of law school tuition, it is abundantly clear that there is an excess of lawyers, and there will be one for many years to come. So I may have missed it, but “The middle class, once again, will be left holding the bag”; how so?</p>