With applications to law schools in free fall and many of their graduates struggling to find jobs to pay off staggering debts, about 3,000 legal educators gathered here over the weekend to discuss what a panel of law deans referred to as “the new normal.”
It’s a world where unemployed graduates take to the courts to sue their schools and where structural changes in the job market are forcing schools to revamp their curricula and slash spending.
Participants at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools described the hard choices they’re making and the tough messages they’re delivering as they seek to reinvent their schools.
“Whether or not it’s true, there’s a perception of absolute crisis and chaos in legal education,” said Frank H. Wu, dean of the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. He described how the freestanding Hastings school had shrunk its class size this year, from 425 to 320; increased the teaching load of faculty members; and cut staff positions.
“I’ve been so candid with my faculty that I worry about faculty morale, but without that understanding, they’re still going to come in with unrealistic demands,” he said. “The question is, Is this a blip or is it permanent? I happen to believe we’re dealing with a profound, permanent, structural change” in the legal job market, and by extension, in legal education, he said.
Law schools produce more than 44,000 graduates each year—about two for every new opening for a lawyer or judicial law clerk, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not surprisingly, the Class of 2011 had the worst employment numbers of any since 1994, with only 55 percent of graduates known to have found full-time jobs requiring a law degree nine months after graduation.
Reports of unemployed graduates who are drowning in debt and suing their schools gave many would-be applicants pause as the number of applications tumbled a cumulative 25 percent over the last two years. As of last month, the Law School Admission Council reported that applications for the fall of 2013 were down nearly 25 percent from where they were at this time a year ago.
The continued nosedive has many talking seriously about a point that seemed unthinkable several years ago, when record numbers of students were flocking to law schools: the point at which there won’t be enough applicants to fill all the available seats and some law schools could be forced to close.
If law schools hadn’t begun to trim their enrollments, those lines could have been crossed as soon as next year, said Jerome M. Organ, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis. If the Law School Admission Council’s early numbers hold up, just under 53,000 students will apply for seats in next fall’s class, he said. Over the last decade, law schools have never admitted fewer than 55,500 into their entering class.
Faced with such numbers, law schools have put the brakes on years of accelerating enrollment over the last two years, trimming entering-class sizes by 15 percent since 2010, according to preliminary figures from the American Bar Association.
Pressure on Students
The turmoil in legal education has many students feeling stressed out and depressed, worried about their chances of landing a job that will put a dent in their six-figure student-loan debts. With jobs so hard to come by, the pressure to score at the top of one’s class is more intense than ever, making law schools’ competitive atmosphere even more cutthroat, according to speakers at a session on student well-being.
Meanwhile, the very nature of legal education, which emphasizes cognitive reasoning and “thinking like a lawyer,” encourages students to stifle their emotions as they engage in adversarial sparring matches.
The fallout can include escalating rates of depression and alcohol use as students progress through law school, according to Robert P. Schuwerk, a professor of law at the University of Houston. He teaches a seminar in which students critique legal education and discuss their psychological and emotional responses as they progress through law school.
“By their third year, a lot of students are angry or depressed or both,” he said in an interview. “Some blame career services, and other say the curriculum didn’t teach them enough practical skills and that the only way they’ll be able to be a lawyer is to hang out a shingle.”
Other law schools are coming up with their own ways to support students. George Washington University Law School now assigns all first-year students to one of six cohorts, which provide support and camaraderie, along with opportunities for mentoring and individualized career counseling.
Many law schools are providing students with as much practice-based experience as they can, through clinics and “bridge” programs in their third year, to make them more marketable.
Meanwhile, law schools are under intense pressure to be upfront with prospective students about both the debt they will incur and their job prospects if they enroll.
Job-Placement Information
In August the bar association’s accrediting arm approved new standards requiring law schools to report much more specific information about scholarship retention and employment prospects. Rather than just reporting that 90 percent of graduates were employed nine months after graduation, the schools must now disclose whether the jobs are part time or temporary, paid for by the school, or don’t require a law degree.
“It may not be a coincidence that with the greater transparency, we’ve seen a decrease in applications,” said Scott F. Norbert, deputy consultant for the bar association’s accrediting group.
Despite the new requirements, many of the nation’s 202 accredited law schools continue to report misleading statistics on their Web sites, according to a fellow panelist, Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
For instance, he said, law schools still compile average salary figures based on little more than half of graduates reporting, and those figures are typically skewed upward because graduates with jobs in top firms are more likely to report their income than those who are unemployed or working for low wages.
Mr. Organ, of the University of St. Thomas, said legal educators should pay more attention to their educator role when publishing employment data about their schools.
“One of the problems law schools are dealing with is that we don’t think of ourselves as professionals relating to clients,” he said. “Often we act as trial lawyers and assume we can put out information at the edge of what is reliable and that there will be an adversary putting out information to counter that. That’s OK in trial, but our relationship with prospective students should not be an adversarial one.”