No Letup For Law Schools’ Malaise

Law schools, in particular second-tier law schools and below, continue to suffer from a confluence of forces with no easy fix. The New York Times examines the issue, with the struggles of one Indiana law school as a case in point. This spring fewer than 70 percent of Valparaiso law school graduates from the previous spring had found work, and fewer than half had jobs that required a law license. The problem stems in part from the fact that in the face of a sharp decline in the numbers of applicants that began about a decade ago, standards for acceptance were lowered and, predictably, the percent of graduates that were able to pass the bar exam also dropped. That’s just part of a story that’s playing out nationwide: declining enrollments, lower standards, and shrinking faculty are all part of the landscape, with one result being that many students are graduating with massive debt and little chance of repaying it within any reasonable time frame, if at all.