Law School Enrollment Research Articles

Legal series and legal careers: Investigating relationships between watching the legal drama Suits and law school enrollment

The paper investigates whether watching legal series leads to law school enroll- ment. First, the study analyses if series consumption is related to enrolling at law school. This is achieved by analyzing data of 1,353 students from Münster, Germany. Hence, lo- gistic regressions are conducted. Thereafter, the odds ratios of studying law are compared for the periods before and after the first broadcasting of the series Suits. Results suggest that watching legal series is highly significantly related to studying law. Moreover, findings indicate that the broadcasting of Suits is followed by a rise in application and enrollment numbers at Münster Law School.

Curricular Change in Legal Education

This article surveys basic changes in legal education from 1973 to 2017-2018, using a comparison of the sizes of the student body with the professoriate, and changes in the allocation of faculty resources over this period. It offers evidence on the reasons for declining bar passage rates and the decline in preparation for business and transactional law practice. The paper documents law school enrollments over this period. In summary, student enrollments have been on a roller coaster, and now have declined to 1973 levels after a 40% increase. At the same time, faculty numbers have increased by 70%. While this has resulted in more favorable faculty-student ratios, bar passage rates nationally have declined from 82% to 72%. This is a classic picture of a failing industry, which high fixed costs due to the fixed cost of tenured faculty and cyclical revenues, forced to raise tuition to support what has become a bloated faculty. It also raises questions of whether declining bar passage rates are caused by the declining academic credentials law school applicants, or modern failures in teaching. I will not cover the blame placed on U.S. News ratings or ABA changes (expansion) in costly curricular requirements, so ably covered by Professor Victor Gold. The study documents that resources have been diverted (disproportionately) from foundational and required courses to more academic and “boutique” courses. Some of this may be attributed to the increased number of law faculty members who hold advanced degrees in other fields, which may divert part of their teaching to courses with an affinity for their graduate training, rather than professional preparation. The proliferation of such courses, and of courses driven by political and cultural choices dilutes any focus on preparation for the practice of law or bar passage. It also sends a message that professional preparation is no more important than the research interests of various teachers, or than their interest in “social justice.”

Violations During the Pandemic of Law School Faculties’ Authority to Decide Methods of Instruction

During the pandemic, some universities have required as much “in person” teaching as possible everywhere on campus — including a university’s law school. Universities and their administrators who did this were wrong for three reasons. First, their fears that students would not enroll unless taught “in person” turned out to be unfounded. National postgraduate and professional school enrollment, including law school enrollment, actually increased even though almost half the country’s colleges and universities began the fall semester or quickly went primarily or entirely online. Second, these weren’t decisions about public health alone. They were also decisions about the quality of education. “In person” usually turned out to be an untested and primitive form of hybrid instruction that has no track record and has never been used on any scale before. During the pandemic the choice has never been between genuine “in person” teaching and online teaching. Public health concerns continually put some students online because of contagion risks. The real choice has been between fully online teaching (nobody in a classroom) and simultaneous hybrid teaching (some students in a classroom while others participate online). In many but not all situations, simultaneous hybrid teaching is demonstrably worse than fully online teaching. Third, university administrators who made unilateral decisions about methods of instruction violated basic rules on shared governance under the nationally authoritative 1966 AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The AAUP has already begun investigating some colleges and universities on this basis. And to the extent a university’s unilateral decisions included a law school, the university’s actions also violated the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards and the Association of American Law Schools’ Bylaws. A law school needs ABA accreditation for its graduates to take the bar exam, and nearly all law schools are AALS members. The ABA accreditation standards and AALS Bylaws combine to require that decisions about modality — modes of teaching — be made by a law school’s faculty, not by administrators elsewhere and imposed on the law school.

Understanding and Interpreting Law School Enrollment Data

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has a long-standing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in legal education and in the legal profession. In line with its mission to promote quality, access, and equity in legal education, LSAC is providing a report, Understanding and Interpreting Law School Enrollment Data: A Focus on Race and Ethnicity, to help law schools, admission professionals, and other legal education stakeholders understand how we are measuring who is in the pipeline. The purpose of the report is to inform conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in law school and recruitment efforts. The report outlines the history of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) data reporting standards, how these differ from LSAC data collection and reporting practices, and the social and cultural implications of different race and ethnicity data collection and reporting methods. The report includes examples of how the different methods affect conclusions that can be drawn from analyses of subgroup trends over time.

Gender Equity in Law School Enrollment: An Elusive Goal

Women finally make up more than half of law students nationwide, but that milestone masks significant gender inequities in law school enrollment. Women constitute an even larger percentage of the potential applicant pool: for almost two decades, they have earned more than 57% of all college degrees. As we show in this article, women are less likely than men to apply to law school — or to be admitted if they do apply. Equally troubling, women attend less prestigious law schools than men. The law schools that open the most employment doors for their graduates enroll significantly fewer women than schools with worse job outcomes and weaker access to the legal profession. We explore here the factors that may contribute to this ongoing gender gap in law school attendance. We also propose several strategies for closing the gap. Enrollment equity alone will not put women on an equal footing with men; a sizable literature probes gender biases that pervade the law school environment. Recognizing and addressing the enrollment gap in legal education, however, is an essential first step toward improving the representation of women throughout the legal profession.

A Framework for Thinking About Law School Affordability

This research report, authored by Sandy Baum, Ph.D., explores the most constructive ways to think about the affordability of legal education in the context of trends in law school enrollment, prices, debt and employment. However, the report cautions that law school affordability cannot be evaluated through simple metrics; it must be measured by taking into account the lifetime value of the investment. The report was commissioned by Access Group to add to the public discourse about what makes law schools affordable for students in different circumstances.

Increasing Diversity by a New Master's Degree in Legal Principles

Students who leave their JD program before graduation leave empty handed, without an additional degree or other credential indicating that their law school studies had any professional, educational, or marketable value. The absence of such a credential combines with the substantial risks and costs associated with law school education to discourage risk averse students from applying. The adverse impacts of these risks may be especially great for lower income students who have fewer financial resources to draw on and less information about their fit with legal education and the legal profession. I propose that law schools award a master’s degree to students who successfully complete the 1L curriculum but leave before completing the full JD curriculum. My suggested name for this degree is Master of Legal Principles (MLP). This degree option will lower the risks associated with law school enrollment as well as provide a valuable and largely-standardized employment credential. Using detailed educational data from the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), I show that the lack of field-specific training provided by undergraduate majors impedes learning about the likely fit of potential students with the law school curriculum and the legal profession. Using labor market data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET), I document a wide range of occupations for which the MLP degree would be appropriate, in that these occupations draw on legal knowledge but do not require a JD degree. Without the debt associated with the full JD curriculum, those with the MLP will be positioned to provide limited legal services at a lower cost, thus increasing access to justice. The expanded degree offering of an MLP degree also will benefit law schools by attracting more, and more diverse, applicants.

Predicting Law School Enrollment: The Strategic Use of Financial Aid to Craft a Class

In this study, we explore what factors predict student decisions to enroll at law schools and how the probability of enrollment varies across students with various profiles and conditions. To find the predictors of enrollment and differences in the probability of enrollment across groups, we employ a logistic regression model using the institutional data obtained from one of the top-ranked law schools in the nation. After estimating the logistic regression model, the probabilities of enrollment are calculated for students with specific profiles and conditions based on the coefficients generated by the logistic regression analysis. The findings reveal many factors that are associated with the probability of enrollment at this law school. Particularly, students with higher academic qualifications, underrepresented minority status, the most selective undergraduate school, STEM background, and previous applicant status have a lower probability of enrollment compared to their respective counterparts. Simulation analysis findings show that the increase in financial aid does not increase the probability of enrollment for URM students and that out-of-state and international students are more sensitive to financial aid increases than in-state students. Admissions and enrollment management offices at individual institutions could apply this exercise with their own data to understand who is more or less likely to enroll and how their students with various profiles respond differently to various financial aid offers and recruitment efforts. It is our hope that this article is used as an example to other law schools to leverage their institutional data to create enrollment models that will help make more effective admission decision making.

Predicting Law School Enrollment: The Strategic Use of Financial Aid to Craft a Class

Predicting Law School Enrollment: The Strategic Use of Financial Aid to Craft a Class

Diversity as a Law School Survival Strategy

Over the past few years, law schools have been dealing with a drastic and, so far, unyielding decline in student interest. Between 2010 and 2013, student enrollments fell almost 25%, to levels not seen in 40 years. This trend has prompted many to wonder what schools have done, and what they can do, to ensure their survival in this new climate. This article explores the extent to which law schools have used students of color, particularly black and Hispanic students, to bolster enrollments and lessen the effects of the downturn. The results of this analysis suggest that a school’s median LSAT score influenced the extent to which the racial composition of its entering classes changed between 2010 and 2013. Black and Hispanic students were critical components of the enrollment management calculus for private law schools with the lowest median LSAT scores. Higher-median schools tended to rely more heavily on white and Asian enrollments to stem declines. These trends led to increased racial and ethnic stratification in law school enrollments, where black and Hispanic students were more likely to attend schools with lower median LSAT scores in 2013 than in 2010, while white and Asian students were more likely to attend schools with higher median scores. Perceptions of law school quality and prestige are greatly influenced by a school’s median LSAT score; therefore, the trend of stratification may only serve to intensify racial and ethnic differences in career paths and trajectories.

Immigrant Lawyers and the Changing Face of the U.S. Legal Profession

��� overall volume and composition of law school enrollments. At stake are the futures not only of individual applicants, but also of law schools. In this Comment, I extend Lazarus-Black and Globokar’s analysis further downstream to consider the stakes for the U.S. legal profession as a whole. Gatekeepers to LL.M. programs are doing far more than determining individual fates and collectively shaping the future of U.S. legal education. I will demonstrate in this Comment that their work helps shape—in concrete, measurable ways—the demographic composition of the U.S. legal profession. In so doing, I will contribute to the emerging field of legal demography, which refers to the study of lawyers through the analysis of data not collected for this specific purpose. 2

Pricing Clinical Legal Education

Some blame the cost of clinical legal education for high law school tuition. They argue that, regardless of the educational and employment benefits to students, clinical legal education, and law clinics in particular, are too expensive to expand or require for all students in a time of decreasing law school enrollments and revenues. This Article is an empirical examination of these claims. Reviewing tuition, curricular and enrollment data from all law schools, this Article demonstrates that 84% of law schools already have the capacity to provide a clinical experience to every student without adding courses or faculty, although only 18% presently require or guarantee that training. It finds there is no effect on the tuition and fees students pay from requiring or guaranteeing every student a clinical experience and no difference in tuition between schools that already have sufficient capacity to provide a clinical experience to each student and those that do not. In addition, there is no tuition growth associated with the increased availability of experiential or law clinic courses for students or the increased participation of students in law clinics, in spite of the higher costs many associate with clinics. These findings demonstrate that clinical courses have not cost, and need not cost, students more in tuition. The Article concludes that providing a clinical experience to every student is more a question of a school’s will to provide that educational experience than of cost.

Transnationalizing Mexican Legal Education: But, What About Students' Expectations?

The number of Mexican institutions of higher education (hereinafter also referred to as “Institutions” or “IHE”) offering Bachelor's Degrees in Law has increased rapidly. For example, in the 1997–1998 academic year, there were 364 Institutions offering the basic law degree; by the 2006–2007 academic year, the number had increased to 930. It is as if, over the last ten years, each week a new IHE began offering a Bachelor's Degree in Law. During that same period, law school enrollment in Mexico increased from 170,210 to approximately 240,000. By 2003, the Bachelor's Degree in Law was the degree program with the highest enrollment in the country – 11 out of 100 students at the college level chose it.

How Black Law School Enrollments Will Collapse under Race-Blind Admissions

How Black Law School Enrollments Will Collapse under Race-Blind Admissions

Black Women Now Dominate African-American Law School Enrollments

Black Women Now Dominate African-American Law School Enrollments

Black Law School Enrollments: A Virtual Eviction in Texas and California

Black Law School Enrollments: A Virtual Eviction in Texas and California

New Judicial Opportunities and the Surge in Black Law School Enrollment

New Judicial Opportunities and the Surge in Black Law School Enrollment