Law School Applicants Decline, Especially Among Grads of Elite Colleges

We’ve written before about the declining interest in law school, as evidenced by the number of people taking the Law School Admission Test and the number applying to law schools. Over at the Associate’s Mind blog, Keith Lee notes that the number of applicants is down across the board, but the drop-off is particularly sharp among people who went to elite schools for their bachelor’s degrees.

He looked at graduates of the Ivies and three other schools (Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago); I’ve done a similar analysis, but included the top 20 national universities as ranked by U.S. News that send a substantial number of alumni to law school each year. (Note that M.I.T. and Caltech, which are top-ranked national universities by U.S. News, are not included in this analysis because they are not among the top 240 biggest feeders to law schools for which the Law School Admission Council releases data.)

Across the board, the number of people applying to matriculate in fall 2012 was 67,700, down about 17 percent from the number who applied to matriculate in fall 2008 (82,000).

The average decline in applicants who graduated from the “elite” schools was 28 percent.

U.S. News National Universities Ranking	Feeder School	Applicants to Law School for Fall 2008	Applicants to Law School for Fall 2012	Decline (%)
1	Harvard	357	251	30%
1	Princeton	209	172	18%
3	Yale	320	234	27%
4	Columbia	231	190	18%
4	University of Chicago	212	175	17%
6	Stanford	262	179	32%
8	University of Pennsylvania	416	324	22%
8	Duke	304	233	23%
10	Dartmouth	195	171	12%
12	Northwestern	330	230	30%
13	Johns Hopkins	156	105	33%
14	Washington University in St. Louis	248	167	33%
15	Brown	249	177	29%
15	Cornell	534	314	41%
17	Rice University	135	67	50%
17	University of Notre Dame	348	232	33%
17	Vanderbilt	281	232	17%
20	Emory	325	211	35%

Among all 240 feeder schools that the Law School Admission Council releases data for, Rice had the biggest decline; 135 of its alumni applied to matriculate in fall 2008, but only about half that number applied for the fall 2012 semester.

I’m not sure why graduates with bachelor’s degrees from these higher-ranked universities have shown larger declines in interest in law school. Maybe they have access to better career services offices, which informed them that opportunities for newly minted lawyers have declined. Or maybe the range of jobs available to them in nonlegal fields has recovered faster than that for most college graduates, so the Ivy Leaguers feel less pressure to wait out the terrible job market by enrolling in law school. Or maybe it’s just coincidence.

I should note, by the way, that among the 240 feeder schools the Law School Admission Council tracks, there were 55 feeder schools that saw their alumni law school applicants increase; 22 schools had percentage increases in the double-digits.

Among the schools with the biggest increases in percentage terms were Florida Gulf Coast University, Liberty University,  Sam Houston State University, Utah Valley University and the University of New Mexico. Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences and Kaplan University had the biggest increases in the number of their alumni who applied to law school, but both of those universities were founded relatively recently.