Very quietly, without notice to anyone, the LSAC updated their LSAT data on the top 240 feeder schools into law schools. It usually comes out around this time every year so I check on it on occasion to see if has been updated. I do this because back in 2013 I identified the trend that top university students had begun to avoid law school. See:
- Top University Students Avoiding Law School – Charts Edition! (2013)
- Top University Students Avoiding Law School – 2014 Edition (Statistics + Graphs)
- Yes, But Where Have Law School Applications Gone Up? (Chart)
Since we have a new year’s set of numbers, let’s see how things stand.
Click for huge version.
Still down across the board.
- Harvard and Columbia were the only schools that had a noticeable increase in feeding graduates to law schools (Chicago only sent three more students).
- Cornell and U Penn students are still in “STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM LAW SCHOOL” mode.
- Princeton is down significantly as well.
But from 2013 to 2014, there was only a modest percentage decline for the other schools. Perhaps we’re seeing a leveling off in top university students avoiding law school.
The question then becomes: is this level the new normal or will top university students start going back to law school in higher numbers?
We’ll need a couple more years of data to see.
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A few notes.
- When the LSAC updates the top 240 list, it only maintains the past five years. If I hadn’t been personally keeping track of this data, there would be no way to look at it long-term. There is no reason for the LSAC to do this. They can (and should) make all of this historical information readily available.
- Just like the ABA’s 509 reports, the LSAC continues to release this data in the most non-usable, non friendly manner possible. They just dump the data into a PDF and stick it in the back corner of their website. This data was absolutely originally sourced in a spreadsheet. There is no reason to not release the spreadsheet to that people who want to look for trends and information; they have the ability to do so easily. At least the ABA finally got around to releasing their data as spreadsheets. It only took them four months after I had done it in a couple of days. But I digress.
