At a recent CLE, I talked about the drop in the number of law school applications. LSAC keeps a moving tally of the number of applications and the number of applicants to US law schools. As you know, the applications this year are well below last year, and the applications last year were well below the prior year.
In the chart I printed yesterday, the number of applicants this year is currently 40,000 compared with 50,000 and 60,000 applicants (approximately) in the two immediately prior years at this time in the cycle.
And last year at this time, LSAC reports, 76 percent of the final number of applicants had applied. So absent a "growth spurt" we can expect the numbers to stay the same relative to each other.
But LSAC does the same tally of applicant and application numbers for Canadian law schools. Here there is no signficant fall off from 2011 to 2012 or 2012 to 2013. The graph lines converge.
How can this be? Are we so overlawyered where by contrast Canada has found the market sweet spot? Are Canadian law graduates finding jobs, thereby explaining the continued strength in the Canadian application rate? And if so, why the difference?