Law School Matriculant Crunch Coming to an End

That’s the most reasonable analysis one can make of the ABA’s Standard 509 Information Reports, which appeared on the Internet on December 15th.

Before the fun a few preliminaries:

• Blessedly, the ABA chose to release all the data in spreadsheet form at once, making my life much easier. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
• However, its GPA and LSAT scores spreadsheet omits a few law schools, includes others it shouldn’t, and throws some curve balls.
• Excluded: Concordia, Lincoln Memorial, Penn State (Dickinson), Penn State (State College). (Note, as of this fall, the Penn States are two separate law schools, but as far as I’m concerned, its State College school was founded and accredited this year.)
• Included: University of Dallas (not accredited yet)
• Curve-balled: Rutgers (as one law school, along with entries for Camden and Newark), Atlanta’s John Marshall (Savannah) (subset of its parent), Cooley-Michigan (subset of all Cooley campuses), and William Mitchell and Hamline are still separate law schools, which might surprise people.

I haven’t parsed all the spreadsheets, but some contain similar bizarreness. Hopefully, no one who has reported on the data already has committed any errors as a result.

So…

In the 2015-16 academic year, there were 32,595 full-time matriculants to 205 ABA-accredited law schools, down 850 matriculants from 2014-15. That year saw a 1,228-matriculant decline, so the crunch is slowing down for the law schools. (These figures exclude the three law school in Puerto Rico, as I usually do.)

Full-time applicant acceptance rates are largely flat, except at the 90th percentile.

Matriculant yields are up slightly as well (omitted), but ultimately about 26 law schools account for half of the decline in matriculants since the last trough year, 2007, which I believe is a better comparison year than 2010, which was a peak year.

Meanwhile, application growth rates are still accelerating.

Nearly a quarter of law schools saw a growth in applications. First place goes to Lincoln Memorial (124.1 percent), rising like an undead menace despite the ABA’s initial denials of accreditation. Number two, which I think is fair to report given that Lincoln Memorial was only recently accredited, is Denver at 56.7 percent. I’m not quite sure how it pulled that off.

Last year, I discussed at length how U.S. News‘ top-twentyish law schools saw an unusual bounce in applications. Curiously, that phenomenon has been blunted. Last year the top fourteen received 72,769 applications, but this year they hauled in 66,982—the lowest since 2000, which was back when paper applications were all the rage. I hypothesized that would-be applicants believed that no one was applying to elite law schools, so their applications would succeed. Maybe that was right, maybe not, but regardless, I’m stumped as to why the application decline resumed for these schools.

Consequently, I haven’t seen any real surprises from the application data yet, but there’s more stuff to comb through, so stay tuned.