Law Schools Applicants Lowest in 10 Years

If you are applying for law school this year, you might want to start celebrating because you will have less competition than any other applicants have had for the past 10 years. The Law School Admission Test recently reported that it administered fewer tests this year – only 84 percent as many as it did last year. The number of tests taken has failed by 25 percent in the past two years.
This decline in the number of people who are taking the LSAT could be a reaction to the view that the legal market in the USA is in pretty bad shape. This means that the 45,000 law students who are expected to graduate this year will have a hard time finding a job, which might be causing new applicants to rethink their decisions to pursue a law career.
“For a long time there has been this culturally embedded perception that if you go to law school, it will be worth the money,” said Kyle McEntee of Law School Transparency, an organization that specializes in law education policy. “The idea that law school is an easy ticket to financial security is finally breaking down.”
What is causing this shift? Some people point to the large amount of debt that law school students graduate with, after paying for four years of undergraduate classes and then an additional three years’ worth of tuition for law school. Also, many law professors contribute the shrink in possible jobs that will be available for these future lawyers to outsourcing of lower-end legal work. These jobs might soon be handled overseas because many corporations want more cost-efficient ways to handle their legal issues. Yet another cause could be the negative press that some law schools have received via blogs written by graduates who cannot find jobs after graduation.
Via The New York Times