Why the law-school bubble is bursting

[n2doc]

By Annie Lowrey
Posted Friday, March 18, 2011, at 4:49 PM ET

The law-school bubble may have just burst.

According to data from the Law School Admission Council, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the number of applicants to law school has dropped a whopping 11.5 percent year-to-year—to the lowest level since 2001 at this point in the application cycle. Some schools are still accepting applications, so the numbers will change in the coming weeks, says the council's Wendy Margolis. But about 90 percent of applications are in, and the pattern is clear.

It is a remarkable turnaround. The number of applicants to law school has waxed and waned over the course of the past decade, but the general trend has been up. And applications took a further turn skyward when the recession hit. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of LSAT takers jumped 20 percent, and the number of applicants swelled 6.3 percent. (Between 2001 and 2002, after the dot-com bubble burst, the number of applicants actually jumped more, by nearly 20 percent.)

Over the past decade, the number of law-school students has also steadily increased, as universities have opened or expanded their schools. Law schools tend to be moneymakers: They're cheap to set up, and tuition runs high, even at poorly rated programs. Thus, universities have added them on with relish, and the list of approved law schools has increased 9 percent in the past decade, to 200. That means that the number of new lawyers minted every year has not stopped growing, either: Law schools awarded 44,004 degrees last year, up 13 percent in a decade.

But the prospects for those legions of new lawyers have been grim, a fact hardly unbeknownst to them

more
http://www.slate.com/id/2288751/

[badtoworse]

1. The shortage of jobs for law school graduates is not a new problem

There was an article in the WSJ about three years ago pointing out how bad the job market was then and it's only gotten worse. I tried to convince my friend's daughter not to spend the money on a law degree, but she didn't listen. She'll graduate in about two months, but has not yet gotten a job offer.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. No doubt it was the competition that influenced some of the negative

changes in the "profession." I found an article in the eighties when it first started and even a lawyer stopped calling it a profession and referred to it as a business, understanding what, exactly, was going to be lost in the transition.

[riderinthestorm]

3. My nephew is graduating from Harvard Law in May. No job offer yet.

Valedictorian in his high school class, Berkeley undergrad, top honors....

He's heading back to be an intern again this summer at the place he interned last year. If even the top schools are having trouble placing their grads, it's definitely a supersaturated market.

[CommonSensePLZ]

6. Congrats to him ~nt

[aikoaiko]

4. We can only hope.....

[snot]

5. They failed to mention another trend, off-shoring--now also affecting lawyering.

[bbgrunt]

7. lawyers are not needed in a lawless land.

[calimary]

8. Indeed, especially when the lawless have their OWN flock of lawyers now.

All those fresh-faced young grads of Liberty "University" and other such "institutions" that teach faith-based everything. Remember that little blonde cookie who wound up testifying late in the dubya years about vote caging and how she "crossed the line" in that scandal regarding the politically-motivated firing of all those US attorneys who weren't prosecuting Democrats as vigorously as kkkarl rove said they should? She was a product of one of those "law schools." And there are legions of them still imbedded in the Justice Department, left there because junior appointed them all.

YES! Just found it - monica goodling.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/05/monica-goodling-i-know-i-crossed-line