Stats Of The Week: Another Stagnant Year For Law Schools?

Law school applicant numbers are down about 2% compared to last year.

stat imageHas the law school community been engaged in a bit of “wishcasting” with its recent, palpable optimism that the legal education market was thisclose to rebounding? Jeff Thomas, executive director of pre-law programs for Kaplan Test Prep is afraid so. “This past year, in our law school admissions officers survey, we’ve seen high levels of enthusiasm from law school administrators believing that their efforts to boost applications were on the verge of paying off,” Jeff told us, “but as the recently released LSAC numbers show, we are looking at yet another year of stagnant growth, and most of that enthusiasm was not well-founded.”

The LSAC data shows that, to date, there have been about 319,000 applications submitted by nearly 48,000 applicants for the 2017–2018 academic year. Applicants are down 1.9% and applications are up 0.3% compared to 2016.


Brian Dalton is the director of research for Breaking Media. Feel free to email him with any questions or comments.

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