Requiem for Law School

Law School Letdown

After decades of steady growth, the legal profession is finding that it too is not recession-proof. “The number of Law School Admission Tests administered this year declined by 16.2 percent, the largest drop in more than a decade, the Law School Admission Council reported,” Katherine Mangan writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The numbers reflect widespread pessimism about the value of a legal education today as education debts soar and job prospects remain dim.”

“The decline, from 155,050 tests in 2010-11 to 129,925 this year, follows the previous year’s 9.6-percent fall.” Ironically, frustrated job seekers are putting to use the post-graduate skills they learned, by suing their alma maters.

“The drop comes at a difficult time for the nation’s law schools,” Mangan explains. “A team of lawyers representing disgruntled law-school graduates has filed 15 lawsuits against law schools for allegedly publishing inflated data on the jobs and salaries of their graduates.”

“The lawyers recently announced plans to sue 20 more schools if they round up enough plaintiffs to pursue class-action lawsuits, and to continue cranking out batches of suits every few months.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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