Revisiting The 0L Mind

A look at the findings of a survey of students currently studying for the LSAT regarding the legal education landscape.

A couple of months back, Jordan Weissmann of Slate and our own Joe Patrice got into an entertaining little dust-up over Weissmann’s assertion that “Now Is A Great Time To Apply To Law School.” The various arguments ranged over — among other things — the available data from the ABA and the BLS, the scholarship of Michael Simkovic and Brian Tamanaha, and the impenetrable mystery that is the “JD Advantage.” We’ll let readers determine who got the best of the debate. (Hint: Joe did.) But as pundits squabble over the value of a JD or the wisdom of the applying to law school in 2014, what are current would-be law students themselves thinking?

Recently, in collaboration with our friends at Blueprint Test Prep, we conducted a survey of 400 Blueprint students studying for the October 2014 LSAT. (We conducted an earlier, different 0L survey in conjunction with Blueprint back in 2012.) Our goal was to get a snapshot of these 0L’s perceptions of the legal education landscape: will it be harder or easier to get admitted? What are the most important factors in choosing a law school? What are law school admission officers looking for? What are employers really interested in?

Read on to see what we could glean from the 0L mind, including their thoughts on why fewer people are taking the LSAT and applying to law school, even as some — à la Weissmann — predict the demand for lawyers will outstrip supply the supply of law school graduates in 2016.

One clear finding from our survey is the legal profession’s fixation on “prestige” shows no sign of abating and manifests itself from the very onset of a legal career. A comfortable majority of respondents told us that “prestige of law school/US News ranking” was the most important factor in choosing a law school. A whopping 83% identified “prestige/USN” as either the first or second most important consideration. On the other hand, less than a quarter of these 0Ls rated “job placement record” as the crucial analyzing variable. Considering the well-publicized horror show that is the legal employment market, some might find this relative lack of emphasis surprising. (As regular readers are well aware, here at ATL we feel a bit differently about the relative importance of job placement outcomes.)

Some other takeaways:

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  • Respondents were roughly evenly split as to whether current conditions make it easier or harder to get admitted to law school this fall than it has been in the past few years, with 48% believing it will be easier and 52% harder.
  • “Location” was the second most common factor cited for choosing a law school. Notably, location was not one of the survey options, but rather was a “write-in” choice. “Bar passage rate” was a distant second among the write-in factors.
  • It is unsurprising that 0Ls cite the LSAT as the No. 1 consideration of law school admissions. What is striking is the fact that 90% of respondents felt this way, with GPA a distant second at 9.46%.
  • Nearly 60% of respondents believe that law firms are most interested in “prestige of law school” in their hiring decisions. “Ranking in first year class” and “work history” came in at numbers two and three, with 28.52% and 21.69% respectively.
  • We also asked the 0Ls, “Why do you think fewer people are taking the LSAT and applying to law school?” When we ran the responses through a word cloud generator, the result looks like this (click to enlarge):
    Think “Job Market” with a dash of “Debt” and “Cost.” No mystery there.
  • Finally, when we asked the Blueprint students to explain their choice of the most important factor in choosing a law school (recall “prestige/USN ranking” was the overwhelming favorite), the word-clouded outcome looked like this:

To a lay person, this might seem odd. Again, respondents were presented with a number of choices for most important law school selection factor, including “prestige” and “job placement record.” Most chose prestige, less than 25% chose job placement. Yet in explaining their choices, “jobs” were the common theme. It’s as if people said that “brand” is the most important factor in choosing a coffee—far ahead of “taste”—and when asked why brand matters much, claimed it was because of taste.

This reaffirms two things. First, prestige, that nebulous concept, utterly permeates the legal world’s view of itself. Sure, there are many examples where prestige is a useful proxy (e.g., prestigious Stanford is obviously a great law school). But it is not a shortcut to understanding in all cases. Second, for those of us who would urge potential (at least non-elite) students to look beyond prestige and evaluate actual data on job outcomes, there is still a long way to go in making the case.

(For Blueprint’s own take on the survey findings, visit their website.)

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