Law Schools

On-Campus With Elie: Over The Cliff We Go

More bad numbers, and still law schools do nothing.

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This week, the New York Times reported that law school enrollment is down 30% since 2010. Total law school enrollment has not been this low since 1973, when there were 53 fewer law schools.

In response, law school deans placed their heads in sand in hopes that not acknowledging the news would make it go away. Are there other historical examples of businesses being this paralyzed in the face of structural change as the business of legal education? There are no new ideas, there is barely any price sensitivity, it’s almost as if American law schools are being run by Blockbuster.

Or Yale. The fundamental problem with the law school curriculum is that it’s all based off of the Yale system. Which is stupid because most law schools are not training the Supreme Court Justices of the future. Most student choice is also based off of going to the most prestigious law school you can get into, which is unfortunate if you happen to have a crappy LSAT score. You have a bunch of schools that want to be Yale and a bunch of students who wish they were going to Yale and so everybody meanders along after Yale like a dumb dog on a long leash.

You know who is doing just fine in the current low-application environment? YALE! Yale is the freaking OG of being Yale. Their business is good. Other top schools who can credibly call themselves Yale-like are also doing just fine. Duke, Stanford, the state-school mafia of Michigan/Berkeley/UVA, they’re not feeling the hurt.

Downstream schools that couldn’t find Yale if it sent them a map are getting clobbered, and they do nothing. Keith Lee at Associate’s Mind put together some real cool charts based on the latest ABA enrollment data. Here’s what the enrollment decline looks like at the top schools:

And here’s what it looks like at the schools ranked 101-110, according to U.S. News:

Notice the difference? The first chart says “Nothing is f**ked here Dude.” The second one says “The goddamned plane has crashed into the mountain!” People in the first group should be proceeding as normal, people in the second group should be the most creative, risk-loving, businesspeople on the planet.

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Lee’s graphs, (see them all here) only go through the top 150 schools. I did a chart that looks at the enrollment situation for the bottom 50 law schools:

If you look closely, you’ll see that the guy holding the fiddle is wearing an ABA T-shirt. Their schools are withering. NOT YALE. But damn near everybody else. The accrediting organization must loosen up the rules to allow these schools to be more creative at addressing the concerns of the students who are not applying.

HOW IN THE HELL IS LAW SCHOOL STILL THREE YEARS??? Is there anybody old enough and young enough to not need a DIAPER who still thinks that’s a good idea? Why are so many schools accredited in the first place? Why do schools still need to maintain a library? Why is the tuition still too damn high? Why are we training people to be document monkeys instead of solo businesspeople? Why are there still so many law reviews and journals? Why is there any course titled “Law and…” ANYTHING? Why are professors and not employers designing the curriculum? What is an associate dean for strategy and planning and why doesn’t he need food stamps to supplement his income?

It’s almost 2015. The recession hit in 2008. Law school needs to be different now than it was before. What part of that don’t these people understand?

If Yale jumped off the Empire State Building, would you follow? Trick question. Yale IS the Empire State Building. It is laughing at your attempts to climb it.

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Elie Mystal is the managing editor of Above the Law Redline and is available to run your law school.

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