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So, what’s up with legal education these days? Well, lucky you asked. The good folks at AccessLex have created a Legal Education Data Deck to track the latest law school trends. And, there are some pleasant surprises in there.
Here are the most noteworthy takeaways.
First of all, the bad news (at least for the 2021 law school applicants): applications were way up last year. The result was a decline in the overall admission rates to 68 percent. But the number of applications for 2022 is returning to normal, so this will hopefully be more of a blip than a trend.
AccessLex also reports that the gender balance in law schools has shifted. Female applicants admitted to law school outpaced that of male applicants. As they noted, “admission rates for men have historically outpaced rates for women, but in 2021 women were admitted at a higher rate than the previous year, breaking the equal admission rates by gender streak from 2014 – 2020.”
The racial and ethnic diversity of law school applicants remained pretty steady from 2020, but that still outdid the 2019 numbers. As they report, “In 2021, White applicants comprised roughly half of the applicant pool, while White applicants comprised just over sixty percent of applicants in 2019.”
And importantly for those that are on the hook for paying for law school, the price tag has gone down. Private law school tuition is down to 2016 levels. Public in-state is dropped to 2014 levels with non-resident tuition for public law schools lower than 2013 levels.
Check out the full report below.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
