Law School Applications Are Down. Will COVID-19 Spur a Late Comeback?
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the law school application cycle, but some experts predict a surge in late applicants hoping to ride out the rough job market.
June 03, 2020 at 01:22 PM
5 minute read
The law school applicant pool looks likely to shrink this year, ending a two-year resurgence that legal academics had hoped would become a sustained recovery to offset years of decline.
Applicants to American Bar Association-accredited law schools are down 2.5% from this point in the cycle last year, according to the latest data from the Law School Admission Council. By early June 2019, schools had received 95% of all applications for the coming fall. If that timing holds true for this year, schools have little chance of making up that lost ground on applicants.
But the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is a looming question mark over the law school admissions landscape, and it's not clear whether historical application trends and patterns will play out this time around. The most obvious change this year is the disruption of the Law School Admission Test. The council canceled both the March and April in-person LSATs due to the coronavirus. But it rolled out a pared-down, online version of the exam in May. The LSAT Flex, as the remote exam has been dubbed, is being administered for the second time next week and again in July. Thus, it's possible that schools will see a wave of late applications from people who planned to take the LSAT in March and April but had to take the May LSAT Flex instead. (Score from that first LSAT Flex, which approximately 10,000 took at home, will be released June 5.) There is typically a surge of applications submitted immediately after an LSAT score release, noted council president Kellye Testy in an interview Wednesday.
"COVID created a period where nothing happened, and it shifted the timeline down," Testy said. "What we might have usually seen happen on May 1 could happen more like May 30 this year. Right now, we're 2.5% off last year. I personally think it's amazing that it's only 2.5% given all the disruption."
Another wrinkle in the admissions picture is whether this year's crop of graduating college seniors will make last-minute decisions to ride out a rough job market in law school and other graduate programs, as they did in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. (For law schools, 2010 remains the high-water mark for the applicant pool, illustrating that interest in graduate school is traditionally countercyclical with the strength of the economy and job market.) The COVID-19 pandemic hit relatively late in the admissions cycle, and college seniors who were spooked by their bleak economic prospects weren't able to switch gears and take the LSAT Flex until last month due to the canceled exams.
"Earlier, a more robust economy seemed to be putting a damper on interest in law school," said University of Iowa law professor Derek Muller, who writes about admissions trends on his blog, Excess of Democracy. "My sense is that matriculation rates might actually rise—I think students who've applied for law school are probably more inclined to get into a three-year J.D. program, even with an uncertain fall, rather than face the more uncertain job market. But that'll take a little time to see."
Testy said she has heard from many applicants who say that they didn't originally intend to pursue law school this fall but are going that route due to canceled job offers and internships. Many law schools have extended their application deadlines to accommodate those latecomers, she noted. Meanwhile, a council survey of law school applicants found that the vast majority are still planning to enroll this fall despite uncertainty over what form their education will take.
"It's at 85% or more, of those who have decided they still will attend," Testy said. "They don't love that it might be online, but that wouldn't significantly affect their decision."
It has been a tumultuous and sometimes unpredictable decade for law school admissions. After peaking in 2010, the national applicant pool contracted for six straight years. By 2016, the number of applicants was down nearly 38% from 2010. But the applicant pool leveled off in 2017 before spiking nearly 8% in 2018—an unexpected surge that was dubbed the "Trump Bump" on the idea that national politics were pushing young people to pursue legal careers. Law school applicants were up another 3% in 2019.
An increase in applicants doesn't necessarily translate into more students, Muller noted. New law student enrollment dipped slightly in the fall of 2019 despite more applicants—likely a combination of schools being more selective about who they admit and some applicants deciding not to pursue law school after all.
Despite the overall decline in applicants for the fall thus far, council data shows increases in the number of applicants with strong LSAT scores. The number of applicants with scores falling between 165 and 169 is up more than 6% over last year. The number of scores between 170 and 174 is up 1%, and scores in the highest band—175 to 180—are up nearly 7%. (Those high scores represent just 1% of all applicants, however.) By contrast, each score band from 164 on down saw a decline from the previous year.
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