Who wants to go to law school anyway?

In the thick of test-taking season, many stressed students begin to ask themselves a simple but telling question: why am I even doing this?

Who wants to go to law school anyway?

Well, that’s a good question. The answer is complicated. 

To start, the endless political games characteristic of American life have wrought havoc on higher education recently, so the average law-school-hopeful may look a lot different in the wake of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College 600 US _ (2023), in which the currently-conservative Supreme Court decided that Harvard didn’t make a good enough argument for a race-conscious admissions system, and the Trump administration’s bloody murder of the SAVE repayment plan.

Whether this will drastically change the makeup of future law school classes remains to be seen, despite how predictive the cards may seem. Until the data are revealed, we are limited to examining the trends of the past. 

According to the 2023 LSAC Matriculant Survey, “41.8% of the 1L class were from racially and ethnically minoritized groups, 56% were women, 14% were LGBTQ+, 24% were first-generation college graduates, and 75% were the first in their families to go to law school.” In 2024, nothing much changed: the ABA found that women comprised 56.1% of 1Ls, “along with 42% men, 1% another gender identity, and .9% [who] preferred not to respond.” Most of your competition identifies as white (56.8%), followed by Hispanic, Asian, and Black students, in that order. More students now say they want to go to law school to contribute to the public good than say they want to attend for the shot at financial security. The median score for 2021-2024 LSAT takers was 153. 85% of people borrowed money in some way to get through law school.

There are less prospective U.S. law students than there would have been had there not been a push for transparency in job outcomes in 2010, when “the media and prospective law students took notice of inflated enrollment, inadequate job prospects, and high prices—and enrollment dropped,” to where it has now stabilized around 38K new 1Ls each year.

So, to answer your question, lots of people want to go to law school. Not everyone, not even most people, but enough that you probably fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between shoe-in and dead-last. No matter your story, there’s someone similar who dreams of attending their top school and eventually gets that big envelope.

Why not you?