Law Schools

Law Schools Continue To Bleed

It’s that time of year again. No, not Christmas or your holiday of choice. December 15th is the day that law schools must produce their ABA 509 Required Disclosures!

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It’s that time of year again. No, not Christmas or your holiday of choice. December 15th is the day that law schools must produce their ABA 509 Required Disclosures! Woo! Happy… boring statistics and stuff. If you don’t have the day marked on your calendar, I understand. They only started reporting this data recently.

But the 509 data is quite interesting if you want to keep tabs on the pulse of legal education and the future of the profession. Of course, you have know when this information comes out as the ABA and law schools don’t exactly publicize it.

Last year at Associate’s Mind, I broke down the data on all ranked law schools as well as all the unranked law schools. It… wasn’t good. Upon seeing the data, Elie compared the bottom 50 law schools to a burning house.

So how are things this year?

Lowest Of The Low

Over at Excess of Democracy, Derek Muller tallied the current number of matriculants and compared it to historical data. The result?

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First-year matriculants totaled 37,058 at 204 ABA-accredited law schools. Matriculants were at their height in 2010 with 52,488. Just five years later, and law schools have lost 15,000 matriculants.

Oh, and the current crop of first-year matriculants is the lowest number since 1973, when 37,018 matriculated to 151 law schools.

Best time to go to law school ever!

Top Law Schools

Since we’re here at Above The Law (and because I think USNWR rankings are overblown and don’t scale well past the top 30 schools or so), let’s look at how the schools in Above The Law’s Top 50 Law Schools Ranking did (click to enlarge):

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From 2011 to 2015:

  • 42 schools had decreases.
  • 1 school remained flat.
  • 7 schools had increases.
  • Largest decrease: Seton Hall at -43.23% (266 to 151).
  • Runner-up decrease: Saint Louis University at -42.37% (295 to 170)
  • Largest increase: Arizona State at 27.98% (168 to 215).
  • Runner-up increase: UC Berkeley at 15.758% (254 to 294).
  • The highest ranked school (Harvard) had a .54% increase.
  • The lowest ranked school (Akron) had a -16.57% decline.

Yikes. As title of the post suggests, law schools continue to bleed students, even at top-ranked schools. If you look at the percentage change from 2014 to 2015, the decline appears to be easing. But I think it’s too early to say that it has completely bottomed out yet.

If you want to see how your school fared, you can see statistics on all 2014-ranked USNWR law schools’ ABA 509 data at Associate’s Mind (and see all that red).

Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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