Law Schools

Law School Enrollment Falls Again

On the other side of the coin, applicants are up this year by about 3% so far. Does this mean enrollment will rebound?

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Yesterday, the ABA Section of Legal Education made its annual law school data dump. Here are some highlights.

Conditional Scholarships
A conditional scholarship is any financial aid award, the retention of which is dependent upon the student maintaining a minimum grade point average or class standing, other than that ordinarily required to remain in good academic standing.

According to the latest data, 58% of law schools reported offering conditional scholarships. However, some of these schools appear to be reporting this incorrectly, so the percentage is likely slightly lower.

No law school introduced a conditional scholarship program. The following schools reportedly eliminated theirs:

  • Arizona Summit
  • Campbell
  • Cleveland-Marshall
  • Mississippi College
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • University of Akron
  • University of La Verne
  • Western State
  • West Virginia University

The majority of these schools were clustered in two regions, Southern California and the central part of the Rust Belt. It’s likely these schools eliminated the conditional scholarship programs under competitive pressure.

Full conditional scholarship dataset here.

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Enrollment

Since law school enrollment peaked in 2010, first-year enrollment is down 29.4%. In just the last year, enrollment declined another 2.2%. There is no easy way to say whether schools cut enough, or too much for that matter. It’s an imprecise science that depends on the context in which you’re asking the question. It rarely makes sense to draw a conclusion using the national dataset.

If you’re concerned with whether reasonable job opportunities will exist for graduates at a particular school, however, you should look at a number of factors in addition to 1L class size: the school’s geography, relative reputation, recent attrition and transfer patterns, and recent job outcomes. You should also consider how competitors managed enrollment, the local/regional legal economy, and recent graduates still holding out for entry-level legal jobs. Together these factors will help you triangulate high-quality job outcome projections.

If you’re concerned with whether a school chose to manage enrollment to remain financially viable, the answer is a little easier, but still school-specific. As I have written about extensively on here for the past two months, many law schools have made the choice to enroll students who face significant risk of failing the bar exam. In this sense, dozens of law schools did not cut enrollment enough. Had they, many would close down due to a lack of paying customers.

Applicants are up this year by about 3% so far. Does this mean enrollment will rebound? In part that depends on whether schools are satisfied with the students enrolled already. Schools may use the increase as an opportunity to shore up credentials or revenue, but probably not both if the increase is a modest 3%.

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Kyle McEntee is the executive director of Law School Transparency, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to make entry to the legal profession more transparent, affordable, and fair. LST publishes the LST Reports and produces I Am The Law, a podcast about law jobs. You can follow him on Twitter @kpmcentee and@LSTupdates.

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