Surprised to see this make the front page...<p>The basic fact is that only half of the 45,000 or so law graduates each year will even get jobs as lawyers. I disagree with many that the ABA should clamp down on accreditation. The AMA did that in the last few decades, and while that guaranteed solid employment prospects for medical school graduates, it also led to skyrocketing salaries and medical costs. I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea.<p>However, I do support measures to increase transparency and make educational loans harder to get. In-state tuition at the University of Michigan in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars). It is now over $48,000/year.<p>Now, the teaching of law has not changed since Harvard Law School was founded in 1817. You get a bunch of students in a room. You make them read cases from a casebook. You grill them in front of the class on their comprehension of the cases. It's not a high-tech process, but it works, and can be extremely cheap. There is no reason tuitions need to be 4x higher than they were just 20 years ago. The soaring cost of legal education is really the perfect example of how incredibly dysfunctional our higher education system has become. At least with engineering or medical school tuitions you can point to the expense of lab equipment, etc. Not so with a segment of academia where students are taught the same way they have been for two centuries.
There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book <i>Don't Go To Law School (Unless)</i> (which I wrote about here: <a href="https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unless-paul-campos/" rel="nofollow">https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-sch...</a>) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too.<p>The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.
Not too surprising: university enrollments tend to crash following job-market crashes in a sector, with a lag of a few years. Look at what happened to CS enrollments after the dot-com crash, for another example [1]: by the time the lowest point was reached, they were down ~50% from the peak, and some schools saw a >75% decline in CS majors, leading the department to be eliminated at some smaller schools. (It's picked up again lately, though enrollments are still not back up to the peak years.)<p>[1] Chart from the CRA, though note that this is charting number of degrees <i>awarded</i> rather than freshman enrollment, so has about a 4-year pipeline lag. Hence, the downturn starts in 2004-05 rather than 2000-01: <a href="http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2009-10_undergrad-CS-production.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...</a>
As a recent law graduate: Finally. I had no idea what people who started in law school in 2011+ were thinking. They went to law school at a time when almost every month a major publication wrote an article about terrible job prospects and rising tuition. Law school is by and large a scam.
<i>Now comes word that applications in this admissions cycle appear to be in something like free fall. As of December 7th, they are down 24.6% from the same time last year, while the total number of applicants has declined by 22.4% year over year. These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total of somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this cycle, i.e., slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188 ABA accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on “at the moment”).<p>To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD students two years ago</i><p>-- The Key Data
Original article on Professor Paul Campos' blog:<p><a href="http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applications-to-law-school-are.html" rel="nofollow">http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applicati...</a>
Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.<p>It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.