That’s what is happening now. The number of U.S. law school applicants for the 2026 cycle is up an estimated 17 percent from last year, according to data from the American Bar Association compiled by the Law School Admission Council. That figure is a staggering 44 percent increase from just two years ago.
But for this new wave of aspiring lawyers, the safety of the ivory tower comes with a steep entry fee and a shifting floor. Between new federal loan caps and the looming shadow of generative artificial intelligence, the legal profession’s newest recruits are walking into a high-stakes gamble that looks very different from the one their predecessors lost after the 2008 financial crisis.
Enrollment rose to 52,404 by 2010, a 7 percent jump from three years earlier. Many of those students didn’t enter the legal careers they may have envisioned; about half of 2011 law school graduates were not working in full-time jobs that required a law degree within a year of graduation.
2 comments:
Going to law school is dangerous for most people financially because it loads them down with more student loan debt, or if they somehow got a BA/BS free somehow, just Law School Debt. The bitter truth of working in The Law in America is that it goes nowhere; most people have to work for themselves, the number of "white shoe" law firms is tiny and they don't hire but a even tinier minority.
There are many "online ruins" of the "scamblog movement" from the Obama meltdown years when people who thought they were scammed by going to law school wrote about it; "Outside the Law School Scam" is still standing, run by an "Old Guy" and his crew; the American Bar Association keeps pushing for new law schools, even though we have allegedly reached saturation point.
There was a guy ("Nando") who ran a "Third Tier Toilet" blog who covered all of the law schools in America; 90% of the schools he wrote about were considered "third tier" or below ("unranked") by the "US News And World Report" rankings that survived the death of "US News" as a magazine. Nando was forced to take the blog down by Drake School of Law, his alma mater, because he made the entire market look bad.....he should have turned his blog into a ranty little book, that would have saved him.
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