The truth behind the ‘drop’ in LSAT test takers and law school admissions

The cliff-notes version: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

The long-winded version:

For many months I have been reading articles tolling the death knell for LSAT takers and, by extension, law schools admissions, the existence of law schools themselves, and even the entire legal profession.  The single factual nugget behind the most recent of these stories is a two-year trend which has seen the number of LSAT test-takers drop by 25%.

Wow, a 25% drop; that sounds bad.  Except that it is not, and it may even bode well for the economy.

These articles are guilty of a classic flaw that we see tested in the LSAT.  It boils down to sloppy reporting by blogs, including some that I would hope to see better work-product from, like the New York Times, or a particularly egregious example in Slate.  (I didn’t include links, the posts were so flawed that they don’t deserve the validation of my link.  Look them up if you like.)  Sloppy bloggers by themselves do no great harm.  The real problem is that these stories get picked up by the print media, which feeds the story into a new echo chamber, and pretty soon, it becomes the accepted fact.  Before you know it, your grandpa is trying to talk you out of a legal career because now even he knows that going to law school is a dead-end career choice.

Before I cast down any more invective upon the heads of these hapless bloggers who, after all, may just be starving English majors trying to fill their daily word quota, I will present evidence to back my argument that LSAT takers and the economy basically move in lockstep.

You don’t have to take my word for it, look at the data yourself:

Wikipedia chart of US recession years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States

LSAC chart of LSAT tests administered: https://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/Data/lsats-administered.asp

If you don’t want to review the data, here is my take.  I look at those two charts and to me it seems obvious that LSAT takers (and by extension law school applications) are closely and directly related to the state of the economy.  Economy good, few LSAT takers. Economy bad, more LSAT takers.  Almost to the month, the number of LSAT takers climb in a recession and fall whenever we are not in a recession.

One could also argue that it was the previous few years that were the abberation with an exceptionally high number of LSAT takers, and we are simply now reverting to mean.

The lesson to be learned is to never base this kind of conclusion on a two-year trend.  Ironically, this would make for a good ‘flaw in the reasoning’ question on the LSAT.  On the LSAT the correct answer to a ‘what is the flaw in the reasoning’ question is often that the sample being relied upon is insufficient to support this broad of a conclusion.  These English-major bloggers would get that question wrong.

Now I don’t know with any more certainty than they do or you do what the future holds for the legal profession, but I do know that basing far-reaching conclusions on an insufficient data sample will cost you a point on the LSAT, and more importantly, it should be avoided when you decide if law school is part of your future.  In fact, some folks are saying that right now law school is a buyers market, with scholarships much more easily obtained than in years past.  So now may be a great time to be a contrarian and apply to law school.

Miscellaneous tidbits not covered in the main article:

I was wondering if my theory didn’t hold water when I saw that the LSAT takers continued to increase for a full year after the recession ended in Nov 2001.  Perhaps it was the first ‘jobless recovery’ was to blame?  The unemployment rate charts at https://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate seem to bear this out and provide additional validation of my theory.

Finally, I was wondering about that big spike in LSATs in 1988-89 where there was no recession and jobless rate was flat to declining.

It really seems to blow my theory out of the water.

I found an explanation that people in 1989 were satisfied with.

‘Applications Hit Record Highs for U.S. Law Schools: Increase Attributed to Impact of Television Hit ‘L.A. Law’’ August 20, 1989

https://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-20/local/me-1216_1_law-school-applications

Weird, huh?  Never discount the effect of outside variables.  Hey, that could be another LSAT question right there.

Tags: applications, law school, lsat info