Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The "Brain Drain" in American Legal Education continues

For good or ill, the "quality" of an applicant to American law schools is almost completely based on two numbers: their LSAC-adjusted undergraduate GPA, and their LSAT score.  Combined, those numbers predict future success in law school and bar passage.  (Whether or not UGPA, LSAT score, law school grades, or bar passage rates have ANYTHING to do with the quality of someone as a lawyer will not be addressed here, but it is what it is.  You are what your numbers are when it comes into which law schools are likely to accept you).

The decline of applications and applicants to law schools over the past few years is well-documented and known.  Some of the latest raw numbers from LSAC can be found here.  Total applicants this year number just below 60,000, which I believe are 5-6 thousand higher than some estimates done by Paul Campos a few months ago (but don't quote me on that, if someone has some estimates post them in the comments and I will update this post to reflect that).   The distribution of those who have stopped applying to law schools are not spread evenly throughout those on the LSAT spectrum.




Last year, a column ran in The Atlantic lamented that "the wrong people have stopped applying to law school."  "Wrong people," of course, as defined by one's LSAT score, but the point was backed up by some hard-to-dispute analysis which noted that the drop of people with lower LSAT scores applying to law schools was less than those with higher LSAT scores, and that those with the higher LSAT scores would be getting into more reputable programs and enjoy the superior employment placement that those programs tend to produce.

This is corroborated by information highlighted recently by Associate's Minds:

"A 20% reduction in applicants in the past three years. People are not going to law school. But if you dig deeper, something else stands out. Looking into the LSAC’s granular data (pdf) – students at the top universities in the country are going to law school in even less numbers."
It is barely worth mentioning that those at top colleges already score higher than average on standardized tests, and thus high LSAT scores are *almost certainly* packed disproportionately into top universities.


What this means to the profession will remain to be seen for at least a few years while the new crop of graduates makes their way through law school, eventually entering glutted field that is only getting worse.

Abovethelaw also has an article on the continued drop in law school applications and links to some other useful sources.  It will be fascinating to watch the schools' reactions to the increased drop in applications and what the brain drain means in the short-term.

31 comments:

  1. The true trash pits, such as Whittier, Wayne State and TTTThoma$ M. Cooley Law Sewer, will not be affected much in terms of "quality" of applicant - since they already accept people with 145 LSAT scores. Their overall class sizes will be reduced.

    Those in the 40-100 ranking will be impacted, as they will need to lower their admi$$ion$ standards further, in order to get asses in seats. I suspect that many in this grouping will do so, even if their overall US "News" & World Report ranking may fall. After all, the pigs want to keep the gravy train rolling along.

    Plus, a commode's rating affects the students and recent graduates, not the "professors." Will any of the swine hurt their "careers" if they end up teaching at the 73rd greatest law school in the land, as opposed to the 51st or 64th most remarkable and prestigious toilet in the land?

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  2. How are they going to deal with the dumbing down of student bodies?

    This is of no major import. The $10,000 retainer a dumb client pays spends just as well as the $10,000 retainer a smart client pays.

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    1. We're not talking about clients, although your point stands - money is money.

      But the general public already hate paying for legal fees. The fees will undoubtedly fall when the general public realizes that lawyers are getting dumber.

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  3. If my calculations are correct, there has been an almost 40% reduction in applicants since 2004 (when the LSAC's preliminary end-of-year data shows there were 98,700 applicants). It seems the "vast middle" may have been hurting for a long time, but has been keeping up appearances hoping for better days. Will a law school's survival now depend on winning "the race to the bottom"?

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  4. Yes, the pigs will not care anymore like they used to about their rankings. In their desperation they will take from lower and lower in the applicant pool.

    Eventually we will see absolute cretins going to T25 schools. Hell, you need to be a self-deluding cretin now to be attending law school anyways. There is absolutely NO reason for 90% of the asses to be in law school seats this fall. We still have a lot of work to do guys. At least we are starting to see some small fruits of our labours.

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  5. i posted a few days ago regarding a dream about taking online courses for LS and by coincidence today i see this article.

    http://www.dailyreportonline.com/PubArticleDRO.jsp?id=1202616031529&slreturn=20130720141750

    "The council moved to eliminate the tenure requirement for doctrinal faculty and deans, make it easier for students to take online courses, get rid of the minimum faculty size rule, and create a clearer path for schools seeking variances from the accreditation standards, among other changes."

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  6. Looks like the Law School Class of 2016* (and beyond) will have an asterisk beside it:

    * Year of abnormally low admission standards.

    LSAT high scorers and kids with stellar UGPA's should be aware that in the public's mind, they will be seen as simply the lucky beneficiaries of greatly relaxed admissions standards at a time when the school was financially forced to admit anyone with a hole and a heartbeat.

    Ahh, the velvet bigotry of low expectations. Now you know what it's like for a person of color who makes it--- "The girl got in only because she's a minority."

    Kids, the game's up. Going to Law School ain't prestigious anymore. The law school brand is a scarlet letter. Burn your acceptance letter, tell your folks you can't live yesterday's dream, and Find Something Else to Do.

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    1. Lowering admissions standards is not as simple as it seems, and your point about minorities shows why.

      My law school class of +/- 150 at a T25 started with 4 Black students. One failed all of his first semester 1L exams and was expelled. One had a mental meltdown second semester of 1L. University psychological services took him away and we never saw him again. One withdrew for unspecified reasons second year and one graduated and became a partner at a big DC firm. Obviously two and maybe three should never have been there in the first place.

      If you dumb down the admissions standards you are either going to have to lower your academic standards or lose a certain number of students before they borrow and spend three full years of tuition.

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    2. "you are either going to have to lower your academic standards"
      Which most law schools will do. Since the entire legal education system, except for a handful of schools, seems to have degenerated into a giant scam. Then when most of their graduates can't pass state bars they will lie and make excuses (law school deans are very good at lying and making excuses).

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    3. This is a real problem. There are thousands of bright people who have, frankly, no business applying to law school. And many many more who have even less business applying to law school, once you throw in mental health and a myriad of other issues.

      It's about economics and opportunity for graduates. If it was just about the hustle, that would be one thing - at least there would be "good" outcomes for graduates, albiet workaholic ones. As it stands, people are being admitted with no thought nor hope as to what happens to them after.

      The Law Schools who put their money where their mouth is and award real scholarships can at least feel good about helping the diversity issue. But the vast majority of TTTs who go on about "diversity" and "access" are only thinking about themselves, not the damage they do to the generations that come after them. The only color they care about is "green".

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  7. Associate's Mind is not a great source for factual data...

    ...but I think we have seen the effects already of lowered admission standards -- lower bar passage rates. If you cannot score well on a test as easy as the LSAT, how will you pass the much more sweeping and grueling bar exam?

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    1. Associates Mind is a shill site for the ABA-whore and Toileteer Keith Lee. He soon has a book coming out to encourage retards to go to law school, published by the ABA. I hope it receives appropriately bad reviews.

      Anything quoting that toilet site should be removed. He is a stealth ABA striver.

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    2. Credited. He and others similarly situated come off as the legal equivalent of Tony Robbins. Nothing wrong with hard work and positive thinking, but its irresponsible to encourage people to do something they really shouldn't consider, for their own well being.

      Oh well. He'll get paid by the ABA and have the ego-stroke of a book being published. That's all that matters. ScamDean frame of mind.

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    3. Yes, Lee has bragged about writing a book about how to succeed in solo practice, and he and the ABA are coordinating marketing and promotion. I have no problem with people attempting to help guide the lost generation of new lawyers, but people who use this crisis as a selfish opportunity to make a few bucks rub me the wrong way.

      Whatever you think of JeffM, he wrote a short book of advice for new lawyers and posted it for free. Even Messinger/Cooper published a cheap eBook version of the excellent Con Law, and Cooper has offered to give free copies to any potential law student who asks for one. Something tells me that Lee's book will cost $20 a pop.

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    4. Whether one agrees or disagrees, I give props to guys like JeffM and Messinger/Cooper for putting their respective message/advice/IP out there. Others, less so, as the Dontald Trump "go to my seminar!" profit motive is blatantly obvious.

      I'm reminded of Kimm Walton and her "guerilla tactics" book. Some good advice, some brutal truth, some hopium. Take it or leave it, but there was no doubt she was getting paid. At least it wasn't all sugar-coated, although a little too optimistic for my taste. Hopefully others won't ring the "law is awesome!!111!" bell too loud without a balance of some hard truth, but I doubt it where the dollaz are concerned.

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  8. The question should not be whether one can score well or not on a standardized exam, but why a standardized exam is required at all, as the only option in most states. I agree with the words grueling having done my share of multistate exams (I will say it does get easier when you can just waive in).

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  9. According to the LSAC statistics, applicants are down 12.3% from last year but applications are down 17.9%. The difference between the applicant and application rate is extremely important because it tells us that applicants are applying to fewer law schools. I would go out on a limb here and hypothesize that applicants now understand that it should be either a T14 or a FSED (Find Something Else to Do). I would also hypothesize that applications are much less than 17.9% in the T14 and are probably down much more than 17.9% after the T14 and the further down the law school rankings foodchain you go.

    I would anticipate a real hunger games for transfer applicants from the T30 this coming summer.

    There's 4.9% decrease in the number of June 2013 LSAT takers from June 2012. There will be real panic (or more real panic) if there is a significant drop in the October 2013 LSAT takers. This is the next number to watch.

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  10. The "best and brightest" are skipping LS cause they caught on. It's a money making venture. So the people still applying and attending law school are the ones who are, well, buying Enron stock as it's tanking.

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  11. To a previous Anonymous - remember, a student who flunks out at the end of their first year still pays the school (or rather, the Fed pays) $25K - $50K. And they don't count against bar passage rates or employment rates. The school can write them off as having failed.

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  12. A future post should ask , "Which will be the first Law School to close its doors?"

    There must be several that are growing more than just a little nervous. The shuttering of the first school will be a seismic alarm clock for a slumbering public that's grown accustomed to pressing the snooze button on their clock radio.

    The cancer consuming the legal profession cannot began to correct itself until many schools close. At the end of the day, law schools are supposed to serve the profession, which in turn, is part of the administration of justice in this country. Allowing law schools to run amuck in a capitalistic, laissez faire orgy has harmed the administration of justice. Government should have closed many schools years ago; now the free market is working its way.

    Merely shrinking student intake is akin to Poision Control telling a frantic, call-in parent to cut their child's consumption of bleach by one-half. No; you don't let the child have ANY bleach ever. Let's hope the free market approach works fast enough.

    So who's gonna be the first one to chant that immortal refrain, "Boom Boom. Out Go The Lights"?

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    1. People have talked about this in the comments to Paul Campos' posts on Lawyers Guns & Money blog.
      The schools most likely to go under are independent law schools with no attachment to a parent university (such as Vermont, Thomas Jefferson). After that comes low-ranked law schools attached to a small parent university which will be unable or unwilling to pay for deficits (such as Hamline).
      Next, the for-profit Infilaw schools (Florida Coastal, Charlotte, Phoenix). Florida Coastal has dropped precipitously in the past three years -- even stupid OLs can smell the rot. Cooley should follow but they are wily criminals sitting on a decent sized stash of cash, so it will be years before they crash out.
      After that, it's take your pick from the bottom of the barrel, the ones already showing visible rot and corruption - schools with almost open admissions, schools that really lie about employment and have been sued, the scholarship revokers and ones with high dropout rates and high transfers out, the ones where the deans make huge salaries, ones with low bar exam passage rates, those who sell assets, etc.
      Widener, Touro, Golden Gate, Whittier, Rutgers, Seton Hall, NYLS, etc etc.

      My guess is that this winding-down process will take a long time. If you throw a rat or cockroach into water, it doesn't just give up and die, it fights to stay alive. So it will be with these toilet law schools and their Valvoline deans.

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    2. Yeah, other than some closures at the bottom of the bottom, I think the deans will just reduce class sizes in future years, which would allow the schools to cut a bunch of the most expensive tenured faculty. It keeps the gravy train operating for the benefit of the administrations and senior faculty for awhile longer. Mass closures only will happen when applications drop another 20% or more.

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    3. The pigs will fight closure until they have extracted the last molecule of blood from the last Lemming. The ones that can see the writing on the wall are already extracting as much profit as they can; to wit, the tuituion increases. I wouldn't be surprised to see accounting tricks that served to transfer wealth into dean and professor pocketbooks.

      Everyone's commented on this before, but it reminds one an awful lot of the housing bubble at the end, where people with no jobs or inadequate jobs were getting $200K houses.

      Any thoughts as to which Toilet in the Chicago area might close first? There are a lot of real gutter schools in the area. John Marshall maybe?

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    4. I don't think JMLS will close-- despite it's stats, it has a deep Chicago alumni presence.

      There are many JMLS grads in the Cook County Circuit Court system and the Cook, Dupage, and Will State's Attorney's offices, as well as lots of JMLS grads in plaintiff's and ID offices.

      Rather, it will limp along, its grads will suffer a lot, and a sizeable chunk of its grads will be on IBR/PAYE for the foreseeable future. It may start culling its grads after the first year to preserve its stats, especially since Illinois has promised to make the bar exam more difficult.

      I'm no fan of JMLS, but its location in Chicago makes it fundamentally different from Cooley, TJSL, or FCL. T-14 Chicago grad whose bosses were are all JMLS grads.

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    5. "Rather, it will limp along, its grads will suffer a lot, and a sizeable chunk of its grads will be on IBR/PAYE for the foreseeable future. It may start culling its grads after the first year to preserve its stats..."

      This, in spades, all over the map. Just like the current economic downturn, unwinding the beast will be slow and painful.

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    6. Keep this in mind with low-ranked schools: a sizable chunk of their class transfers out every year, lowering their tuition revenue and also "depriving them" of above-median students to prop up bar passage rates and employment scores.

      I thought this would be more true of John Marshall, but it's not, according to the ABA law school data they had 28 transfers out and 13 transfers in for 2012: https://officialguide.lsac.org/Release/SchoolsABAData/SchoolPage/SchoolPage_Info/ABA_LawSchoolData.aspx?sid=72

      This is more true at my law school, which sees about the same amount transferring out but 0 transferring in. Couple this with tuition increases lower than inflation and many rumors of more $$$ being offered and you have a bloodbath at the lower rung.

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    7. 11:51 a.m.

      I work in IL State govt. I have met plenty of Loyola, DePaul, and JMLS grads. While the Loyola and DePaul grads give their schools mixed reviews, the "John Marshmellows" seem unanimous in their fierce hatred of their law school alma mater. And we are talking about the most fortunate of JMLS grads, the ones that actually landed public sector jobs. So I wonder whether the JMLS alumni presence in State and Cook County government will save the school.

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  13. Don't know anything about the Chicago market, but here in NYC, the law school that most deserves to die is New York Law School. This third-tier shit pile hits the trifecta when it comes to all that is wrong with the law school industry: (1) sky-high tuition (2) huge graduating classes, and (3) bottom of the barrel academic reputation. Stay away lemmings! Stay far away!

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  14. What about Pace. They probably deserve to get the axe in the NYC market as well. As far as Boston, bye bye New England Law and Western New England. It goes without saying that UMASS-Dartmouth's sorry excuse for a law school and Mass. School of Law should all close without any questions asked. Next you might consider Suffolk, but it has a high alumni representation in Boston so probably won't shut down in the near term.

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    1. No question pace is a radioactive slag heap. Still I have to give nyls the edge based on its slightly higher tuition and larger enrollment. But maybe we are splitting hairs.

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  15. I am going to start the Golden Fartknocker Awards which will be awarded to the most outstanding member of a law school's faculty. My firsy nominee is Catherine Sandoval of,Santa Clara School of Law. Let's send her an email congratulating her on her nomination. Anyone else want to nominate someone?

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