Welcome to law school, 1Ls. Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t — wait… where is everyone? Though perhaps this phenomenon is more modest now than in years prior, thanks to a still decreasing number of students applying to and enrolling in law school, entering first-year class sizes at a number of law schools are quite small. They’re so small, in fact, that for the first time in two years, a Top 50 law school has enrolled fewer than 100 first-year students.
Which law school could it be?
It’s the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, and it welcomed only 93 students to its hallowed halls this fall. The law school’s first-year enrollment is down 23 percent since it welcomed 122 students in 2010. Here’s Utah’s admissions data since 2010:
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(Chart via Law School Transparency)
According to a fact sheet from the law school, the LSAT profile for the most recent entering class is 156/158/161 (showing increases in its 25% and 75% bands) while its GPA profile is 3.33/3.50/3.68 (decreasing across all bands). Here’s some additional information about the school, courtesy of Professor Paul Caron of TaxProf Blog:
Utah is the only Top 50 law school with an entering class under 100 for the past two years. I would love to know how they are able to balance their budget with 46 full-time faculty, giving them a reported 6.8 to 1 student/faculty ratio, lower than every law school except Columbia (ranked #4, 6.1) and Northwestern (ranked #12, 6.5). Utah has a spectacular new building and an audacious goal of ensuring that 100% of its students pass the bar on their first attempt and land professional jobs (more here).
Professor Caron is right to call Utah Law’s 100 percent first-time bar exam passage goal “audacious,” considering the fact that bar exam passage rates across the country have been dropping precipitously for the past several years — including at Utah Law, where the first-time bar exam passage rate declined by 10 percent between the classes of 2014 and 2015. We’ll also note that Utah Law’s goal of having 100 percent of its graduates employed in “professional” jobs (without any indication of whether that goal would be satisfied with part-time employment, as opposed to full-time employment) is even more “audacious” since employment in J.D. Advantage positions and Professional positions need not require bar exam passage. In fact, in light of the costs of attending, everyone who enrolls in law school should be able to find some sort of professional employment after graduation. Perhaps Utah Law has set the bar a bit too low here.
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We’d wish the best of luck to the few, the proud, the 93 1Ls at Utah Law, but it seems like only one of the goals the law school has set for you may be difficult to achieve.
Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.