Law School's Enrollment Crisis? Looking Past the Headlines

Enrollment data for the first law school class since the Supreme Court struck down the affirmative action in college admissions was released last December, andDr. Sari Kisilevsky there was much concern about sharp declines in admission of Black and Hispanic students to elite law schools. The topline takeaway was the decline in the enrollment of Black students at Harvard, though other publication focused on the drop in Black and Hispanic students across the “T14” or elite law schools, and a brief mention was made of declines at University of North Carolina Law School, another defendant in the Supreme Court case.

At the same time, national legal organizations have expressed cautious optimism. The 2024 National Association for Law Placement’s 2024 Report on Diversity in US Law Firms states that the “overarching story” is one of “slow, incremental, and mostly positive, progress,” and the 2024 American Bar Association (ABA) Profile of the Legal Profession declares that “the long-term trend is clear: The percentage of lawyers of color is growing. It nearly doubled in the past decade.”

The fanfare surrounding the decline in enrollments among students of color at elite schools partly reflects the media’s preoccupation with elite education in the US. But beneath these top-level headlines lies a deeper worry. Limiting entry to the country’s most selective institutions will result in a “cascade effect,” pushing talented students of color into less selective law schools.

The immediate concern with this is diminished options and opportunities for advancement for students graduating from less selective law schools. As anyone with passing familiarity with law school knows, law school admissions, and US higher education more generally, is highly ordered, with lower “ranked” programs offering fewer and lower-paid opportunities even while maintaining very high costs.

Less well known is the structure of law school financing that raises the stakes of this cascade effect to potentially catastrophic levels for some students of color and that feeds a potentially predatory and exploitative admissions process that preys on students with the fewest resources.

Law schools are highly tuition dependent. A 2015 ABA report found that on average law schools receive 69% of revenue from tuition, with 25% of schools receiving at least 88% of their revenue from tuition. Tuition dependence increases as law school selectivity (and resulting salaries and job opportunities) decrease: private schools with the lowest selectivity (those with a median LSAT score of 152 or less) received an average of 95% of their revenue from tuition in 2012-13. This puts law schools in a bind. On the one hand, law schools are under increasing pressure to continually raise tuition. At the same time, law schools need to attract students at a price they are willing to pay. Law schools have resolved this by advertising astronomically high “sticker prices” for tuition but awarding varying levels of “merit scholarships” to admitted students helping them build the entering class they aim for.