Law Schools

Majority Of Undergraduate Students Will Never Apply To Law School

Here's a new study that'll squash deans' hopes and dreams of overflowing classrooms and burgeoning budgets.

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Just when law school administrators thought they were able to breathe a sigh of relief because they’d escaped the dearth of applicants comes a new study that squashes their hopes and dreams of overflowing classrooms and burgeoning budgets. Sorry, deans, but according to a detailed survey conducted by Research and Markets, the vast majority of undergraduate students have no desire to go to law school.

Research and Markets interviewed 1,566 undergraduate college students about how likely they are to apply to law school and how they view the future of the legal profession. Students were given five possible responses to the question of how likely they were to apply to law school in the future: 1) Highly Unlikely, 2) Unlikely, 3) Possibly Likely, 4) Highly Likely and 5) I Have Already Applied.

So how many undegraduates are interested in going to law school? Not a whole lot. Slightly more than 84 percent of respondents said it would be highly unlikely or unlikely that they would ever apply to law school. If you find that a bit too depressing, here are some other findings from the study that are a bit happier for law schools:

  • Women were much more likely than men to feel that they were highly likely to apply to law school though men were more optimistic about the economic outlook for the legal profession.
  • The population of students who were pretty sure or very sure of what they wanted to do post college were more likely than those who were not too sure of what they wanted to believe that the economic outlook for the legal profession was good.
  • The more population intense the area in which the survey participant grew up, the more likely that they were to say that they were highly likely to apply to law school.

Are you thinking of applying to law school in the future? Please make sure you do all of your research because before you know it, you’ll be graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt to repay. Best of luck!

2018 Survey of Undergraduates: Plans for Law School & View of the Legal Profession [Business Wire]

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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