Applications for admission drop 19%

Applications to join the Law Center fell sharply last year.The number of applications to join Georgetown Law dropped a steep 19% last year, according to an Admissions Department report provided to the Law Weekly. The drop represents a change from the recent trend of ever-growing law school applications. The decrease in applications this year is not unique to Georgetown, as many law schools faced such a decrease.

Still, Dean of Admissions Andrew Cornblatt wrote in the 2011 Entering Class Report that the size of the drop surprised him.

“While I thought there would be a decline in applications, I expected it to be incremental, 5% - 10%. All of us in admissions were surprised that the drop was so deep.”

Georgetown’s own numbers are acttuallly right in the middle of the downward trend among schools, where enrollment fell between 15% and 25%. Although law schools throughout the nation received fewer applications, but the national average decreased at a more modest rate. Law schools nationally saw 11% fewer applicants.

Law school applications were trending up quickly over the last several years. In 2010, Georgetown received 11,524 applications to its full-time J.D. program. Two years before, in 2008, the school had received 9,815 full time applicants. Applications dropped to roughly 10,000 this year, closer to the number of applications received several years ago. Although this indicates the school’s applicant rate has stayed relatively constant over the past four years, applications generally trend up over time.

The decrease in applications, however, has not greatly affected the quality of incoming students, Cornblatt wrote.        

“Our decrease was greater among the less qualified applicants. The number of top applicants (3.75 GPA and higher and 170 LSAT score and higher) to Georgetown dropped by only 7%. Eleven years ago, 28% of that pool applied to Georgetown, six years ago 45%, and this year 66% applied to Georgetown, exactly the same as last year.”

The Student Bar Association responded to news of the report in a statement to the Law Weekly.

“SBA is confident that the Office of Admissions’ sustained commitment to recruiting a strong incoming class will ensure that Georgetown Law remains competitive among peer institutions,” said SBA President Elizabeth Farrar. “However, as difficult economic conditions persist, it is crucial that administrators remain responsive to national trends in admitting future classes and, further, continue to focus on helping Georgetown Law students find fulfilling employment opportunities that make law school a viable option.”

It is unclear why applications dropped off this year. But 2010 was a time of improved economic prospects for job seekers over 2008 and 2009. Conventional wisdom suggests that harsh economic conditions lead to an increase in applications to graduate programs, as people seek shelter from the difficult job market in programs that they hope will improve their qualifications and will give them a means of waiting out the period.

When job prospects improve, as they did last year after the worst of the 2008 financial collapse subsided, that same conventional wisdom suggests that applications will decrease to ordinary levels. As global economies have been hit by another round of challenging times in 2011, and as job growth has again reduced nationally, the number of applicants for next year’s class remains unclear.

Applicant levels may indicate a less benign form of mean regression than the result of a slight upward trend in the job market. Applications at the beginning of the recession rose quickly. And the pool of people who chose to apply to schools because of the economy might have expended itself in those first few years, so that those who had graduated college some years before 2008 and took the recession as an opportunity to pursue an advanced degree did so early on in the recession and by 2011 only the ordinary applicants were left.

Additionally, prominent news reports over the last year or so have drawn attention to the increasing costs of law school and the increasing challenges law school graduates face in the job market. The New York Times has run a series of articles over the last year on the difficult job prospects for lawyers, and the ways that law schools can and do project greater employed-after-graduation rates than the truth reveals. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that there are 100 lawyers in the field for every open job, an astoundingly high ratio.

Aaron Rabinowitz, 2L

News Editor