Slate continues to cover the bursting of the law school bubble; this time pointing out that law school applications are down 11.5% from this time last year. The job market for new attorneys has improved somewhat in recent months, but not nearly enough to accommodate the glut of law school graduates that enter the workforce every year. Perhaps this decline in applications will portend a shuttering of some of the more marginal law schools, which would only benefit the legal profession as a whole.
Some might might argue that cheering for the closing of lower-tier schools smacks of elitism. Maybe so, but just as not everyone can or should be a physician, not everyone can or should be an attorney. The proliferation of law schools may have thrown open the doors of graduate education to more people, but that wasn’t in the service of the public interest or even the students’ interest. Times are changing and a legal education is not the guarantor of affluence and stability that it once was; a fact with which law schools are only beginning to grapple. And I say this as someone who recognizes that even veteran attorneys face tenuous career prospects. If state government downsizes, I could find myself competing with the aforementioned glut of new grads.
