Record numbers take LSAT. This is really bad news

The LSAT blog writes that the “numbers are out, and they are huge. On September 26th, more students took the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) than have ever taken a single administration of the LSAT in the history of the exam.” It’s approximately a 20% increase from a year ago, and that’s a huge spike considering how consistent the numbers usually are year to year.

It’s obvious that the current lack of jobs for people with just bachelor’s degrees has given ten thousand people more than last year the idea that they should go to law school. (In contrast, for the 23-year period shown on the chart in the blog post, the fewest number of people took the LSAT in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999, the peak years of the internet bubble.)

This will eventually lead to bad outcomes for many, I fear. I predict that legal hiring will still be down in 2013 compared to the 2000s, but at the same time there will probably be record numbers of law students graduating from law school in 2013. Where will they all work? Even during the good years, job prospects sucked for graduates of non-top 14 schools.

I applied to law school in a year when a record number of people took the test in October, and look how crappy it turned out for me.

Comments

[outlaw josey wales]

Bad, bad move. Don't these people read the internets? Firms are cutting or eliminating summer positions, delaying or rescinding employment offers, and firing staff and attorneys. Even being in top 14 will not be a guarantee, and the rest, well good luck. How do they expect to pay off their $160K loans?

While I'm currently in law school, I'm in a "safe" area (IP), actually working at a law firm, and having my entire tuition paid for.

I hope the legal market does not deteriorate even more. That's the best you can reasonably hope for. I see no basis for any improvement in the near future.

[Alex]

It seems like the blame here falls largely on advisers at undergraduate institutions. If a student is planning to go the pre-law route, they should have a pre law adviser telling them that they should not pursue law school if their LSATs are below 165 and their GPA is below 3.5 (those are very rough numbers).

Universities have a perverse incentive to push their students into fields with low mean incomes, but high variation in incomes. Remember that universities get money from their endowment, which comes from their alumni's disposal income. A purely rational university would rather graduate one person who earns $500k and one who is unemployed than two people who both earn $250k, because in the first case there is more disposable income that can be donated.

[Peter A]

What really scares me is that we will continue to deform our economy in order to provide more work for these future lawyers. This is an area of research that would probably be fruitful - since most of our legislators are once and future lawyers, they would seem to have a vested interest in creating a litigious, regulation heavy environment that requires ever more lawyers to navigate. I wonder if there's any proof that this has actually happened.

[C]

"Where will they all work?"

McDonalds?

[Tom]

But this whole analysis ignores the fact that there are only a finite number of slots in incoming law school classes. If more people are taking the LSAT, this just means that law schools will reject more applications, not that more people will attend law school. The higher number of people taking the LSAT just means that getting into law school will become more difficult.

[Turambar]

"I applied to law school in a year when a record number of people took the test in October, and look how crappy it turned out for me. "

Are you talking about Arizona or tax law? I have been quietly rooting for you on the law job.

[J.K.]

Does this hurt people going to the T14? Will any of those schools be increasing their enrollment?

I'm applying for next year, but I'll probably get into a T14. Should I be worried?

[M Stein]

fyi. Another discussion of Fryer & Dobbie's paper on the achievement gap. You previously discussed this after David Brooks wrote a column about it.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/closing-the-gap/#comment-518723

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/05/a-miracle-in-harlem-not-likely.html

[DaveinHackensack]

Is there a Manhattan GMAT for the LSAT (if you're not sure what Manhattan GMAT is, read this before helpfully informing me about Kaplan, The Princeton Review, etc.: http://www.manhattangmat.com/ )? If not, starting one might be a profitable way to ride the wave of law school aspirants.

[BrunoBrazil]

For me, it is called "The Disease of the Developed Economy".

I mean, people don´t have immediate worries about paying the rent, so they direct their studies towards fields that look exciting, glamourous, even if there are no opportunities in practice.

Law is one of them. But there are others: journalism, fashion, editorial (to look like a "cultured SWPL"), music and so on.

Nobody wants a boring predictable job with decent salary and reasonable job security. Accounting? Engineering? Paralegal? Trades? IT? Government Bureaucracy? That is this for Asians and nerds, unexciting careers that don´t sound like TV series characters like Lipstick Jungle.

And after the reality schok, people whine. But, what did they expect? Glamour has its price: misery for 90% of them.

That is why asians will become better and better marital partners in the future and will dominate the business scene. In 50 years, most CEO´s will be asians. Normal whites destroyed themselves by losing the values that made them rich in the first place by drowning in SWPL fantasies. There are the realistic ones. At least one good thing about H1B´s: they have realism.

[BrunoBrazil]

The decaying of an Empire.

1- It can´t maintain a big imperialist projection. The empire has a too large military presence in many places and endeavors itself in adventures: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Can´t you see a pattern there?

2- People stop prioritizing secure activities that pay the rent for exciting stuff: people prefer law, fashion, queer musicology, ocultism, philosophy, fimls as occupations instead of building real wealth like accounting, IT, plumbing, construction and so on.

The SWPLism is a value that is destroying America, as it destroyed other empires, because doing the real work is considered boring. Better telling celebrity scandals than building a home. The rising nations are the ones that have a better sense of priorities.

Law at least is not the worst. If it could be cheap enough to go without debt, 40k or 50k salaries after graduation would be a good return. The problem is more the cost of school than the payoff.

[Yawner]

"In order to survive, big law firms will have to rethink their billing models, law schools will need to retool their career placements options, and law school graduates are going to have to change their expectations of what a law degree means in the marketplace."

You can change your job expectations but most schools won’t change their expectations of how much they should be paid, and people who lend you money won’t change their expectations that they should be repaid.

"this whole analysis ignores the fact that there are only a finite number of slots in incoming law school classes."

Not at all! They'll just increase the student-to-teacher ratio.

[Yawner]

"more big law firms are considering alternatives to the long-criticized billable hour... One associate we spoke with at a Big Law firm in Texas reports that her firm is accepting work for a flat rate per project. Instead of charging $350 per hour, for example, the firm charges a fee of $500 to draft a particular document. "

In this model, what do you need junior associates for? A paralegal could draft the document, get comments from the partner, make edits and then it's done, all much less expensively than an associate. The firm may need associates to bring up in the practice, but not nearly as many...

In principle, that paralegal might not even need to be in the USA!

[traveling boho]

Dave,

This appears to be the kind of thing you're talking about:

http://www.testmasters.net/

[DaveinHackensack]

Bruno,

I don't entirely agree with you, for reasons I don't have the energy to go into now, but your comments reminded me of the great Auden poem, The Fall of Rome:

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

(link: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/494.html )

[DaveinHackensack]

traveling boho,

Yeah, that's closer to it, though it looks like they don't have the laser focus on test prep that Manhattan GMAT does.

[Edward]

It looks like the world is going to change in fundamental ways rather soon. It's likely that many of the metrosexual, paper-pushing-type jobs are going away, whether one went to Harvard or not.

I'm a lawyer near the end of my career, and I can't imagine trying to enter the field today. Everybody's hurting, and jobs are drying up in the big firms.

Half Sigma's advice about accounting is good. I'd advise new law graduates to take the bar, pick up the accounting courses and obtain C.P.A. certification. J.D./C.P.A.s are still pretty marketable.

[Alex]

I wonder how many of these people are coming out of engineering. I'm going to graduate from a lower tier one engineering school (based on USNews standards, where Tier One = Top 100) and I've thought about going the route of the patent attorney.

[HS: People with engineering degrees are a very small minority of law students, which explains why it's easier for them to find jobs as patent attorneys (but not so easy that you can graduate at the bottom of a third tier school and walk into BIGLAW). There's also fact that writing patent applications seems like an especially boring type of legal practice.]

[midizi]

ip law is not looking safe either.