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The Contracting Market For Law School Admissions In The United States, Robert Zemsky

Grantee Research

This report summarizes the analysis of legal education market data, compiled by the American Bar Association and presented on the AccessLex website, by a research team from the University of Pennsylvania's Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD). Robert Zemsky served as principal investigator and Richard Morgan as principal analyst. The research was conducted over two years and yielded two PowerPoint presentations to AccessLex's annual research symposium.

Market Analysis For Law School Admissions, Robert Zemsky, Patricia Burch, Richard Morgan

Grantee Research

The numbers are truly astonishing. Between 2011 and 2015, total enrollments in the 200- plus United States law schools whose data are regularly tracked by the American Bar Association (ABA) decreased by more than 20 percent. The total number of “missing students” was just shy of 30,000, an amount which translates into the total enrollments of 38 average-sized law schools—24 private not-for-profit and 14 public.

Almost equally astonishing, however, is the fact that so little actually changed. None of the 200-plus law schools that reported their enrollment data to the ABA closed. The 65-35 percentage split between private and public …