Wednesday, April 1, 2015

LAW SCHOOL ENROLLMENT - SOME INTERESTING NUMBERS



A recent article in The New York Times caught our attention. Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor of law at University of California, Berkeley, discusses the diminishing enrollments at American law schools. We were struck by some of the numbers he cited from recent surveys:


52,488   Law school enrollment in 2010, the year it peaked


37,924    Law school enrollment in 2014


27.7       Percentage decrease over the past four years


2.9         Percentage by which law school applications are down this year compared to the prior year


93.2       Percentage of 2013 Georgetown Law School graduates who are employed


$160,000         Median starting salary of those graduates who are employed in the private sector


86.4       Percent of all 2013 law school graduates who were still in school or had a job


91.9       Percent of all 2010 law school graduates who were still in school or had a job a year after graduation


So, what do these numbers mean and, more importantly, what do they mean for you? Unfortunately, and as the article points out, the predictions are conflicting and the overall numbers don’t necessarily portray what is happening in a particular market, type of practice or other demographic. 

The author tries to sum it up as follows:


“Still, it is hard to see lawyers going away in the United States economy. Whether or not you like it, their importance is greater now in terms of filling needs for compliance and regulation. . . . Twenty years from now, whether the economy is up or down, there will still be lawyers, and plenty of them.”


You can read the full piece at






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