BLS Updates Its 2020 Employment Projections: For Law Students, It’s Very Bad

It turns out the Bureau of Labor Statistics updated its Employment Projections in February, though the Occupational Outlook Handbook will have to wait until later this month. Data for 2010-2020 are now available. For lawyers, the 2010-2020 projection is even worse than 2008-2018, when the BLS predicted that the legal profession would add 98,500 new [...]

December LSATs Drop to 11-Year Low, Applicants Down

Those who gander at the LSAT data will find the LSAC put up the December numbers recently. I can’t remember if anyone else has reported this, so I’ll touch on it myself. Big drop in December LSAT-takers, and since the number of eligible test-takers (college juniors and up) has grown since then, it’s that many [...]

Not Your Parents’ (or Grandparents’) Profession

In a post a few weeks ago, I teased the BEA for a clear typo on its Web site. For my previous Am Law Daily post, which was based on that, I called the BEA to find out what was what. Turns out my guess of 1,277,000 persons engaged in industry was close (coincidentally), it [...]

Good News! The Legal Sector Grew 2.3 Percent in 2010! The Bad News? Everything Else.

On December 13, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) updated its “GDP-by-Industry” page, which means it released all sorts of useful information on what happened to the legal sector of the U.S. economy in 2010, the sector that employs the vast majority of lawyers. Skipping the soup & salad, we find that in 2010, the [...]

The Law School Debt Blob

Many readers know of U.S. News’ “Graduate Debt Rankings” page, which contains crucial information on law graduate debt that for some reason is not published in the Official Guide even though the ABA is surely collecting it. Law School Transparency does us the favor of providing the same data from the previous two years on [...]

THE LAW SCHOOL DEBT BUBBLE: $53 Billion in New Law School Debt by 2020

So we know that in 2010, a majority of 44,245 law graduates took on $3.6 billion in student debt based on comparing Official Guide and U.S. News data. Without back issues of U.S. News, is it possible to figure out how much debt previous classes took on, and—*gasp*—project it into the future? Yup. The ABA [...]

Federal Student Loan Debt Will More Than Double by 2021; GDP, Not So Much

A few weeks ago I painstakingly projected where the federal government’s Direct Loan Program was going, and for the last several months I’ve been tracking growth in government holdings of nonrevolving debt as a proxy for the government’s Direct Loans balance to prove that. Here’s what I projected: Then a reader directed me to the [...]

2010 Law School Grad Debt at $3.6 Billion

A reader recommended I calculate total law school debt for 2010 grads. How? By taking the number of grads from each law school in the Official Guide and then multiplying them against the average debt levels and the percentage of students taking on debt in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. Why this isn’t in [...]

Consumer Credit Update (2011 October)

It’s the fifth business day of the month, which means the Federal Reserve has updated its G.19 Release, its estimate of outstanding consumer credit. One problem the U.S. economy faces is that nonrevolving consumer credit is growing faster than the economy. While the G.19 Release doesn’t quantify how much nonrevolving debt is student debt, it [...]

ED Data Tell Us Why Researchers Shouldn’t Lump Law Degrees with Other Professional Degrees

If you read large scale studies on higher education that include law degrees—such as the Pew Center’s “Is College Worth It?” and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce’s “The College Payoff”—you’ll find that researchers tend to lump law degrees in with all other first professional degrees. In doing so, they commit an ecological [...]