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The Law School Admission Council and the Association of American Law Schools are launching a new website and social media campaign that will make the case for getting a law degree.
January 17, 2018 at 01:29 PM
5 minute read
Two of legal education's biggest players are teaming up to ease the path to law school for interested high school and college students.
The Law School Admission Council—which administers the Law School Admission Test and serves as the central clearinghouse for law school applications—and the Association of American Law Schools—which counts nearly all American Bar Association-accredited law schools as members—have launched a new partnership aimed at getting information about legal education into the hands of prospective students earlier in their academic careers.
The organizations plan to launch a new website and social media campaign that will provide information about what happens on law campuses, what graduates can do with a law degree, and how to apply. The groups also plan to bolster their outreach efforts with pre-law advisers across the country to help counter the narrative that law school is too expensive and jobs are too scarce.
“We want to better communicate to prospective law students and pre-law advisers about what's going on in law schools today,” said AALS executive director Judith Areen. “Some of the criticism comes from people who are a little out of date.”
Areen and LSAC president Kellye Testy insist the initiative isn't simply about boosting the number of people who apply to law school. Rather, they say the goal is to attract better candidates with a more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities a legal education creates. Moreover, they want to get prospective applicants thinking about law school as early as high school. The AALS is conducting a study of how and when college students make the decision to apply, or not to apply, to law school.
“That study has already shown that people make these decisions much earlier than any of us understand,” Areen said. “A lot of students reported that they started thinking about law school before college, not just during. That underscored for Kellye and for me the need to have better communication, both a website and using social media, so students—even those in high school—who are curious about it can get better information.”
For example, the initiative will clarify that college students needn't major in pre-law to continue on to law school, and can take any undergraduates courses they choose.
Undoubtedly, law school deans would welcome an application and enrollment boost from the new campaign. First-year J.D. enrollment at American Bar Association-accredited law school declined nearly 30 percent between 2010 and 2016 amid a weak job market for new lawyers, prompting shrinking faculties, budget cuts, and the closure of several law campuses. National enrollment has held steady for the past two years, but a hoped-for recovery in the number of aspiring law students has yet to materialize.
There are positive signs for the upcoming academic year, however. The number of applicants by early January was up more than 12 percent compared with the previous year, according to the council. And the number of people registered to take the LSAT in February was up more than 4 percent, marking the fourth straight increase in the number of people taking the entrance exam. (Those increases have fueled speculation that the presidency of Donald Trump and political turmoil in Washington are prompting more people to consider law school.)
The new legal education campaign also comes at a time when the LSAT is facing new competition from the GRE—the standardized admission test used by most graduate programs outside of law, business and medicine. Fourteen law schools, including Harvard Law School, are accepting either the LSAT or GRE scores. The campaign does not address the GRE option.
Testy, a former AALS president and dean at the University of Washington School of Law who assumed the LSAC's top post in July, said she's hopeful that the initiative will challenge lawyer stereotypes and illustrate that lawyers do far more that what people see on television shows.
“People often see the law as mostly about dispute resolution and arguing,” she said. “I think to attract the right diversity of students into law, we need to communicate more fully all the things people do with a legal education.”
Areen said the groups hope to launch the new informational website and social media campaign within the next six months. Meanwhile, the council is in the process of overhauling its website to give prospective students a wider array of information about law school, Testy said. The existing website is geared toward providing information about the LSAT and how to apply, but the revamped site will offer more guidance on how to start the process of becoming a lawyer and insight on what's happening at law schools. Those changes should go public in the next month, Testy said.
Pre-law advisers are another key piece of the recruiting puzzle, according to Testy. Yet, at many colleges and universities pre-law advising is a part-time role assumed by a faculty member who lacks the time and resources to stay up-to-date on the latest developments or attend law school conferences and events. The new partnership will improve outreach to pre-law advisers at those campuses to help ensure their advisees have the latest information and resources, Testy said.
“As I've become the new leader at LSAC, I've seen clearly that we really need a leader for telling the story of law in a way that's much broader for the pubic to understand,” she said. “There needs to be more of a collective voice for that.”
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