a**i
发帖数: 608 | 1 这年月，惨淡的不仅是华尔街。
律师也谋生不易。
医生职业除非愿意去比较偏远的地方，东西两岸的职位也是竞争激烈，完全不是10年前
那种没毕业就 OFFER 一大堆，要求随便提的景象了。
For 2nd Year, a Sharp Drop in Law School Entrance Tests
Published: Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012 | 12:13 PM ET Text Size
By: David Segal
The New York Times Twitter
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The organization behind the Law School Admission Test reported that the
number of tests it administered this year dropped by more than 16 percent,
the largest decline in more than a decade.
The Law School Admission Council reported that the LSAT was given 129,925
times in the 2011-12 academic year. That was well off the 155,050 of the
year before and far from the peak of 171,514 in the year before that. In all
, the number of test takers has fallen by nearly 25 percent in the last two
years.
The decline reflects a spreading view that the legal market in the United
States is in terrible shape and will have a hard time absorbing the roughly
45,000 students who are expected to graduate from law school in each of the
next three years. And the problem may be deep and systemic.
Many lawyers and law professors have argued in recent years that the legal
market will either stagnate or shrink as technology allows more low-end
legal work to be handled overseas, and as corporations demand more cost-
efficient fee arrangements from their firms.
That argument, and news that so many new lawyers are struggling with immense
debt, is changing the way law school is perceived by undergrads. Word is
getting through that law school is no longer a safe place to sit out an
economic downturn — an article of faith for years — and that strong grades
at an above-average school no longer guarantees a six-figure law firm job.
“For a long time there has been this culturally embedded perception that if
you go to law school, it will be worth the money,” said Kyle McEntee of
Law School Transparency, a legal education policy organization. “The idea
that law school is an easy ticket to financial security is finally breaking
down.”
Law schools have also suffered through some withering press in the last
couple of years. Some blogs, most of them written by unemployed or
underemployed graduates, have accused law schools of enticing students with
shady data. Attention has focused on a crucial statistic: the percentage of
graduates who are employed nine months after graduation.
In recent months, class-action lawsuits have been filed against more than a
dozen law schools, charging that students were snookered into enrolling by
postgraduate employment figures that were vastly, and fraudulently, inflated
. Even if law schools are able to defeat these lawsuits — and many legal
scholars anticipate they will — the media attention has been bruising.
Steve Schwartz, an LSAT tutor, said the new LSAT figures were not a surprise
, given the steady decline in the number of students seeking one-on-one
tutoring.
“This is a major turn of events,” he wrote of the newly reported test
numbers on his LSAT Blog, “The tide is turning, folks.”
For some law schools, the dwindling number of test-takers represents a
serious long-term challenge.
“What I’d anticipate is that you’ll see the biggest falloff in
applications in the bottom end of the law school food chain,” said Andrew
Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “Those schools are
going to have significant difficulty because they are dependent on tuition
to fund themselves and they’ll either have to cut class size to maintain
standards, or accept students with lower credentials.”
If they take the second course, Mr. Morriss said, it would hurt the school
three years later because there is a strong correlation between poor
performance on the LSAT and poor performance on the bar exam. If students
start failing the bar, then the prestige of the school will drop, which
would mean lowering standards even more. “At that point,” Mr. Morriss said
, “the school is risking a death spiral.”
This story originally appeared in The New York Times |
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