Is interest in law school waning? ‘This year is not going to be as red-hot off the charts’

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Is interest in law school waning? 'This year…

Law Schools Is interest in law school waning? 'This year is not going to be as red-hot off the charts'

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 10, 2022, 11:48 am CST

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Some statistics are pointing to a lessened interest in law school this year.

Law.com reports on one sign: Only 8,852 people have registered to take the March Law School Admission Test.

“This is smallest we have ever seen recorded,” said Mike Spivey of Spivey Consulting, a law school admissions consultant, in an interview with Law.com.

There are likely to be even fewer test-takers by the date of the March 11 and 12 exam because many people often drop out in the final days, Spivey said.

A spokesperson for the Law School Admission Council told Law.com to take the number with a grain of salt. There wasn’t a March test last year, and test-takers from February and March 2022 combined are slightly higher than for the February 2021 exam.

“The numbers are still trending as we expected,” the LSAC spokesperson told Law.com. “This year is not going to be as red-hot off the charts as 2020-’21, but it is still going to be higher than 2019-2020 and 2018-2019.”

A second sign: Law school applications and applicants are also down, according to Law.com and Reuters.

As of March 7, 50,375 applicants had submitted 363,581 applications to law schools for the 2022 school year, Law.com reported. Last year at this point in time, 55,680 applicants submitted 395,870 applications to law schools.

That’s a 9.5% decline in applicants since last year and an 8.2% decline in applications.

The applicants and applications are higher than two years ago, however.

“The story here isn’t that numbers are down; the story is that numbers aren’t down that much,” the LSAC spokesperson told Law.com.

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