Doubtless, you are proud of your supposed achievement of gaining entry into an ABA-accredited law school. Look at the information below, and you will see that beating a senile, old man in a game of poker is a bigger accomplishment. I’m sure that you feel that a small chance of landing Biglaw, i.e. a job that pays enough for you to pay off your students loans, is worth the immense cost of admission.
https://lawschooli.com/acceptance-rates/
Easy Admissions: On August 10, 2017, LawSchooli published a Joshua Craven piece labeled “Law School Acceptance Rates: The Hardest & Easiest Law Schools to Get Into.” He listed all 204 in$titution$. Here is his opening:
“Law school acceptance rates are an important admissions statistic to consider when you’re applying to law school. In this post, we take a look at the admission rates for every ABA-accredited law school in the US. The table below ranks all 204 law schools from the most selective to the least selective.
The range is broad from the extremely selective—Yale admits only about 9% of applicants—to the unscrupulously open, with schools towards the bottom of the pack accepting a whopping 80% or more of prospective students.
Acceptance rates are a fairly good proxy for how a school ranks in the minds of potential law students. The more desirable a school is, the more people apply and the more the picky the school can be when deciding who they’ll admit. For this reason, the acceptance rate is one of the factors measured in the US News and World Report’s influential rankings of the best law schools.” [Emphasis mine]
According to that chart, here are the 15 easiest diploma factories to gain entry into, in the country. The figures below represent acceptance rate, number of applicants, and number of acceptances, respectively:
190. Depaul University; 69.47%; 1,798; 1,249
191. California Western School of Law; 69.53%; 1,503; 1,045
192. Santa Clara University; 69.54%; 2,157; 1,500
193. Southern Illinois University – Carbondale; 70.04%; 474; 332
194. St. Thomas, University of (Minnesota); 71.13%; 478; 340
195. Charleston School of Law; 72.50%; 1,258; 912
196. Mitchell Hamline; 72.60%; 1,033; 750
197. Creighton University; 72.88%; 944; 688
198. Willamette University; 74.16%; 507; 376
199. Northern Kentucky University; 76.71%; 498; 382
200. Capital University; 79.17%; 528; 418
201. Vermont Law School; 80.96%; 646; 523
202. Thomas Jefferson School of Law; 82.66%; 1,107; 915
203. Loyola University – New Orleans; 84.77%; 709; 601
204. Thomas M. Cooley Law School; 85.75%; 1,067; 915
Look at the entire graph. You will notice that only the top 30 law schools feature an acceptance rate below 32 percent. In 113 of the 204 diploma factories, more than half of all applicants gained admi$$ion. Hopefully you didn’t leave a good job to attend any of those in$titution$. Apparently, dozens of ABA-accredited schools are happy to admit anyone with a pulse. Keep in mind that a 144 on the LSAT is good enough to get you into several places now.
http://www.nalp.org/uploads/Classof2016_NationalSummaryReport.pdf
Weak Employment Outlook: According to the NALP Class of 2016 National Summary Report, there were 37,124 graduates in that cohort – competing for a total of 24,243 jobs requiring bar passage. That translates to 65.3% of the class. Roughly 1/3 of grads ended up in positions that do not require a damn law degree. What a great “investment,” huh?!?!
Furthermore, 16,601 positions were in private practice. However, only 15,232 of those required bar passage. There were 3,300 clerkships for that group. Of that number, a mere 1,195 were in federal courts. You can be sure that the bulk of those posts went to graduates of top 10 schools. These grads are on the inside track to become “law professors.” Yet, third and fourth tier schools will still charge you $40K+ in annual tuition – when essentially all of their students are out of the running.
Also, of the 16,601 private practice jobs, only 1,007 were for offices with 251-500 lawyers. And 4,238 graduates ended up in firms of more than 500 attorneys. Another 948 landed positions in offices of 101-250 lawyers. That is a total of 6,193 such posts – out of 37,126 total grads. That is 16.7% of the entire cohort, which is roughly one out of six JDs. Plus, the vast majority of those jobs went to those who earned their degree from a top 10 law school – with some of the rest going to the rich and connected who ended up at middling in$titution$.
Scroll down to the bottom of the second page. Under the Source of Job section, the number reported was only 23,614. Of that amount, a total of 4,299 were the result of Fall OCI and 364 from Spring OCI. Fully 1,292 returned to their prior job, and another 674 decided to start their own practice. That means that most JDs had to hustle to land employment. The degree itself didn’t do much for them. In the Job Characteristics portion, you will see that 30.7% of academic positions were short-term, and 29.7% were part-time.
Conclusion: In the final analysis, if you have chosen to ignorethe reams of datashowing that law school is an incredibly expensive gamble, then how do figure that you will be able to effectivelyrepresent others in legal disputes? In any economic decision, failing to review pertinent information and facts is not a virtue. However, in a legal setting such negligence constitutes incompetence.
I don’t expect anyone to quit during the first two weeks of law school, but you still have an out soon after. If you are at a non-elite school and your grades do not place you in the top 10% of the class after your first semester, then drop out immediately. You can explain a 5-6 month gap in employment to companies much easier than you can repay $160K+ in non-dischargeable debt, on a paltry $43K annual salary. Best of luck to you all.