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Well-qualified law school applicant pool declines by 61%

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Paul Caron, who just became dean of Pepperdine’s law school, crunched some numbers in regard to the LSAT scores of law school applicants over the past seven years. The results are startling.

I’ve converted Caron’s percentage figures into raw numbers. In 2010, 87,900 people applied for the fall term. 35,863 of them had LSAT scores of 160 or higher. (160 is the 80th percentile on the test.). Approximately 53,500 people have or will apply for admission to ABA law schools this fall.* About 14,065 of them will have LSAT scores of 160 or higher. This is a 61% decline. Meanwhile, the total number of applicants with LSAT scores below 150 (the 50th percentile) has increased from 12,300 to 18,725.

So while the law school applicant pool as a whole has declined by 39%, the decline in better-qualified** candidates has been 56% greater than the decline in the total applicant pool, while the pool made up of weakest candidates has increased by more than 50% in absolute terms, and by 150% as a percentage of the total applicant pool.

All this is obviously bad for law schools. Whether it’s bad for the legal profession in particular, or society more generally, is a more complicated question.

*Prior to 2016, LSAC published applicant totals for the fall term only. Starting last year, it started publishing all-term applicant totals. I’ve compared all-term to fall-only applicant totals for 2015 and 2016, and adjusted the projected final 2017 totals accordingly, to exclude people applying to terms other than the fall.

**On the one hand, LSAT scores are only rough proxy for applicant quality. On the other hand, when the percentage of applicants with below 50% percentile LSAT scores grows from 14% to 35%, it’s safe to say the quality of the applicant pool is deteriorating badly.

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