Many law-school students tossed aside their expectations of working in lucrative private firms last year, instead opting for lower-paying public-interest jobs, according to an annual survey published today.
The Law School Survey of Student Engagement—part of the family of assessments by the National Survey of Student Engagement—got responses from more than 26,000 law students at 82 law schools in the spring of 2009. The research effort, which is in its fifth year, is led by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.
This year’s survey found that the percentage of law students who expected to work in private law firms dropped to 50 percent, down from about 58 percent in each of the previous three years. The percentage of law students who anticipated finding work in the public-interest sector rose to 33 percent, from about 29 percent in each of the past three years.
The findings “may indicate that law students are reframing their career expectations in response to changes in the economic climate that have affected hiring at many law firms,” said Lindsay Watkins, the survey’s project manager.
Many large private firms have responded to the economic downturn by delaying start dates for new hires and taking on fewer new hires from the most recent graduating class, Ms. Watkins said.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its most recent job-outlook report, said that economic downturns often lead to less business for firms because of a shrinking demand for discretionary legal services, such as real-estate transactions. Corporations are also less likely to litigate cases when the struggling economy tightens their budgets.
Still, the agency reported that overall job growth for lawyers was expected to increase at the same rate as general employment from now to 2018.
The economic downturn may have altered job expectations of recent law-school graduates, but the survey found that students’ debt levels seemed to have experienced no such effect.
“Somewhat surprisingly, students with more debt were not necessarily more likely to see themselves in high-paying positions with private firms,” Ms. Watkins said. “The amount of law-school debt did not seem to affect students’ choices to enter traditionally lower-paying fields like public-interest law or government service.”
Third-year law students who acquired substantial law-school loan debt were as likely to expect to work in the public-interest sector as their peers who had little to no law-school debt. In 2009, 29 percent of law students surveyed said they expect to graduate with more than $120,000 in debt.
In addition to exploring students’ job expectations, the annual report provides law schools with insights about students’ intellectual experiences, satisfaction with school policies, and personal and professional development.
Among the report’s other findings:
- Students who are not involved in extracurricular activities study less than their peers and more frequently come to class unprepared.
- More than one-third of all law students say that their legal education places little emphasis on acting with integrity in personal and professional settings.
- Only about half of all law students frequently receive feedback from their professors that is helpful to their academic development.
- Ten percent of law students say they never receive feedback from professors that stimulates their interest in the study or practice of law.
- Male students are more likely than female students to receive oral feedback from professors, both during class and outside of class.
The full report, “Student Engagement in Law School: Enhancing Student Learning,” is available on the survey’s Web site.