A variety of news articles have also covered the decline, often interviewing law school admission deans.
In this blog post, I compile some choice quotes from law school admission deans (and others).
If I've missed any quotes of interest on this topic, please share the links in the comments, and I'll edit this post to include them.
Quotes:
"We’re actually coming off of two record-breaking years for application volume...The current application season isn’t completely over yet, but it looks like we’re going to drop from those levels to about where we were three years ago, which was still a very strong year for us...In the last several years, our acceptance rate has...gone down because of the large increase in applications...At the same time, our medians for the LSAT score and GPA have risen slightly...The students we’re admitting now are more concerned about their prospects for the future...We have worked harder to make the case that it’s precisely when times are difficult that the high-quality legal education available from an elite law school like ours will pay the biggest dividends." - Richard Geiger, associate dean of communications and enrollment, Cornell Law School, 5/1/12
"Law schools can't behave as if we live in this universe where we don't respond to the same market...Every law school is facing this. There's no law school that's in a market unto itself. Every law school is either going to [not] fill your class and you have a huge budget shortfall, or you fill your class with people who to be honestly shouldn't be in law school. And you're not helping them." (on reducing the school's enrollment by 20% over the next 3 years) - Frank Wu, chancellor and dean, UC Hastings School of Law, 5/1/12
"While the drop in LSAT takers has corresponded with a drop in applicant numbers, we have seen an overall increase in visitors to our recruiting events and our school." - Nicole Masciopinto, director of admissions, Baylor Law School, 4/24/12
"Austin’s a great place to live so we don’t have much trouble putting together a strong 1-L group [students in their first year of law school] each year." - Kirston Fortune, assistant dean for communications, University of Texas School of Law in Austin, 4/24/12
"[Law schools] buy LSAT scores by giving lots of scholarship funds. We haven’t been able to play that game...Today we are fighting with more schools than we would have thought...And competing with that has become very different and very difficult. People are getting free rides right across the board." - Karen DeMeola, assistant dean for admissions, University of Connecticut School of Law, 4/23/12
"There are fewer strong students out there." Edwin Wilkes, dean of admissions, Quinnipiac University School of Law, 4/23/12
"[Applications are] down more than 20 percent over the average of the past two admissions cycles." - John Colombo, acting admission dean, University of Illinois College of Law - 3/23/12
"The whole environment is one of caution as opposed to growth like it was a few years ago...If applications keep going down...there are going to be some schools in financial jeopardy." Loyola will have about the same number of applicants this year as it did five years ago. (paraphrase) - David Yellen, dean, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, 3/23/12
"What I’d anticipate is that you’ll see the biggest falloff in applications in the bottom end of the law school food chain...Those schools are going to have significant difficulty because they are dependent on tuition to fund themselves and they’ll either have to cut class size to maintain standards, or accept students with lower credentials...At that point...the school is risking a death spiral." - Andrew Morriss, professor, University of Alabama School of Law, 3/20/12
"I think until good press gets out there about the job situation for lawyers, this decline will likely continue...People who aren’t as Gung-ho about law school are dropping out of the application pool...They aren’t just doing it, because they can’t figure out what else to do." - Wendy Margolis, director of communications, Law School Admission Council, 9/28/11
Photo by rustysheriff
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