This seminal study presents data from a random survey of 1,566 undergraduate college students from 4-year colleges in the United States about how likely they are to apply to law school and how they view the future of the legal profession. In addition, the report details the undergraduate majors that students expect will best prepare them for law school and lists the law schools to which they are most anxious to apply.
Data in the 58-page report is broken out by 18 individual and college institutional variables including gender, race/ethnicity, financial background, sexual orientation, regional origins, expected student debt load, SAT/ACT scores, college grades, college major and other variables for individuals, and public/private status, and college/university type/Carnegie class for institutions.
Among other questions we asked: How likely are you to apply to law school at some point in the future? We gave five possible answers to this multiple choice question, which were: 1) Highly Unlikely, 2) Unlikely, 3) Possibly Likely, 4) Highly Likely and 5) I Have Already Applied.
The resulting data set gives a highly detailed road map to the expected law school plans of American undergraduates at 4-year colleges.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
A shade more than 84% of those sampled thought it was highly unlikely or unlikely that they would ever apply to law school.
Women were much more likely than men to feel that they were highly likely to apply though men were more optimistic about the economic outlook for the legal profession.
The population of students who were pretty sure or very sure of what they wanted to do post college were more likely than those who were not too sure of what they wanted to believe that the economic outlook for the legal profession was good.
The more population intense the area in which the survey participant grew up, the more likely that they were to say that they were highly likely to apply to law school.