Hey Laz,
Thought I would brighten up Monday morning around here:
abanet.org
Law Schools Get a Boost in Admissions When the Economy Goes South
BY TERRY CARTER
There is an immutable law of economics for law schools: If the economy is down, applications must be up.
Applications for law school admission this year are the highest since 1978–another time when credential-gathering was more promising than the job market–according to the Law School Admission Council, which administers the Law School Admission Tests.
"It’s the consensus here that the poor state of the economy has convinced many new graduates, as well as some people who have been in the work force a while, to go to law school to sit out the bad times and get an excellent credential," says Edward Haggerty, an LSAC spokesman.
The 87,005 applications to ABA-accredited law schools for the 2002-03 law school year represent an 18.1 percent jump from last year. People are turning to MBA programs, too. The Graduate Management Admission Council doesn’t track applications, but it does report that the number of GMAT takers has increased more than 18 percent over last year and that 85 percent of the MBA programs report higher numbers of applications.
Some law schools will increase the size of their incoming classes to accommodate the eager applicants–either deliberately or inadvertently, says Carl Monk, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools. The latter happens when an unusually high number of students accept offers of admission from law schools. For example, a school that routinely offers admission to 500 prospective students with the expectation that about 200 will accept the offer might suddenly find that 250 or more decide to enroll.
During the last economic downturn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, things started picking up just as those who ran for shelter in law school were getting their degrees. The employment lows for newly minted lawyers bottomed out in 1993 when just 83.4 percent of them found jobs. That number has risen steadily since then. It was at 91.5 percent in 2000 and slightly lower last year.
Ironically, a big factor in the last recovery was the dot-com boom that began in the mid-1990s, while the burst of that dot-com bubble is a big factor in the current downturn.
The silver lining for employers, perhaps, is that the increased competition for law school admissions probably will mean better graduates in a few years. Some of the more talented college graduates will be entering law school rather than the job market.
But will there be another economic boom like the one that began in the mid-1990s?
"There’s just no way to foretell the job market in a few years," says Paula Patton, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement. "We can only hope for that scenario to be repeated." |
