ShareThisLaw school is no longer a sure bet. Would-be students are noticing.
The swell of students applying to law school -- despite growing debt and contracting job prospects -- has slowed. Nationwide, prospective students have read the bad news, are asking tougher questions and, more often, are declining to apply.
On the bright side, the students starting this fall are more focused, some admissions officers say.
"Frankly, for many years, there were many students who went to law school because they didn't know what to do," said Cari Haaland, assistant dean of admissions for the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. "Now, prospective students are thinking more critically about the decision."
The job market for law school graduates is the worst it's been since the mid-1990s. Both the employment rate and the starting salary fell dramatically for the class of 2010, new reports by the National Association for Law Placement show.
"In the aggregate, this class is going to have a harder time paying down its debt than classes before it," said James Leipold, the association's executive director.
Last year, the average in-state tuition at a public university law school was approximately $18,500, an American Bar Association spokesman said.
During the recession, more people applied to law school, according to the Law School Admission Council. But for fall 2011, the number of applications nationwide dropped 9.9 percent.
The number of people taking the Law School Admission Test this summer declined by 18.7 percent from last year.
"It is possible that many people took the LSAT then to see if law school would be a reasonable way to wait out the recession," said Wendy Margolis, the council's spokeswoman. "But as news about the declining job market for law school graduates spread, fewer people did that."
On legal blogs, law school grads are calling on schools to reduce the number of slots to avoid glutting the job market.
About 87.6 percent of the 2010 class had a job -- any job -- nine months after graduation, according to a June report by the National Association for Law Placement. That's a 15-year low.
Even bleaker, Leipold said, "a lot of students have six-figure debt coming out of law school now."
Yet even that 15-year low "conceals a number of negative trends in the job market," the report says. Only 68.4 of graduates who reported their employment had a job for which they had to pass the bar exam -- "the lowest percentage ... ever measured." About 11 percent of those who reported being employed were working part time.
Big-firm jobs "just dried up," Leipold said. That also contributed to a 13 percent fall in recent grads' median pay. Those in the 2010 class who reported working full time got $63,000, compared to $72,000 for the class before it.
Terran Chambers, 21, is a first-year law student who was accepted at Harvard Law School but chose the University of Minnesota because it offered her a scholarship. "I would love to make big changes," said Chambers, a native of Bemidji, Minn. "I will have the power to do that with a law degree."
(Contact Jenna Ross at jross(at)startribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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