In light of the “Great Recession”, the 2007-2013 economic downtown impacting the United States and many foreign countries, scholars and critics’ criticism of law schools intensified. Stories of lawyers with $150,000+ debt graduating into a weak job market helped lead to a drop off in law school enrollment. After a 52, 488 enrollment peak in 2010, enrollment at law schools fell to levels not seen since 1973.

In addition to the recession, a number of factors contributed to the decline in law enrollment –the pursuit of more “practical” degrees such as engineering, skyrocketing tuition costs, and the presence of online legal startups like LegalZoom? and Avvo. These factors fueled perhaps the greatest impactor of the law school enrollment fall: the declining prestige of a legal degree.

Minority enrollment rates in law school illustrate the decline in law degree prestige. The legal profession might be the least diverse in the United States because historically, minorities and women were not given the same opportunities to practice to law as white men. The legal profession’s exclusivity help create the prestige of a legal degrees: access to the profession could lead to the economic mobility and, most important, the social mobility reserved for white men.

Minority communities in particular, are less sensitive to precipitous drops in law school enrollment, or in the projected success of a law school graduate. Many people of color view the law degree as a stepping stone to the “in-group”, as a means to enter a society that has resisted their inclusion. Judge and professor Thurmond Arnold, in his 1937 work “The Folklore of Capitalism” framed professions such as lawyering as societal “heavens”. Lawyering became a desirable path in the social order. Society viewed law school as a place to earn a versatile degree—as a means through which one can become a politician, make money as a CEO, or start a business. The law degree became a symbol of power. Many inherently understood what Felix S. Cohen wrote in “The Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach”, or what Oliver Wendell Holmes explained the his famous speech “The Path of Law” – that masters of the law understand what certain people will do in particular situations, and know how to manipulate ideas and concepts in order to serve a social purpose.

As the economic benefits of a law degree fell, many who were not moved by the social benefits of a law degree alone stopped applying to, and enrolling in law school. Both white and minority law school enrollment dropped. Yet still, in part because people of color valued the social benefit of become a lawyer, minority employment at law schools declined at a lesser rate the non-minority rate. The total applications for law school decreased from about 90,000 in 2010 and 81,000 in 2011 to 62,656 in 2013, 58,110 in 2014, 56,588 in 2015. However, from 2011-2015, with the exception of Asian applicants, the percentage of minority applicants that made up the law school applicant pool increased. The percentage of black and Latinx part time student applicants, for example, increased from about 30% of the applicant pool in 2011 to 40% in 2015. By 2016, women became the majority of law students while law school enrollment remained flat.

St. Louis University School of Law School professor Aaron Taylor, in a 2013 study “Diversity as a Survival Strategy”, thoroughly analyzed the disparity between minority and non-minorities in the law school application and enrollment process. Taylor found that the proportion of minority law school students at schools increased from 25.5% in 2011 to 30% in 2013. Schools outside of the top 40, as identified by the U.S. News and World Report Survey, accrued nearly all of the diversity gains. Except at the top 36 schools, a group Taylor called quintile 1, black and latinx students became a greater proportion of student bodies. Quintile 5, a subset of the lowest ranked schools, saw the greatest increase at 11.5%. The trend of increased minority enrollment at lower ranked schools worsened as the overall decline in law school enrollment rose.

The increase in diversity at law schools does come at a price. Taylor couched his analysis with a rebuke of the “conventional wisdom” that “subpar schools are taking advantage of subpar students”. In a National Law Review article about his a study, Taylor explained that “schools that ensure good career prospects aren’t making diversity a priority”. Taylor is correct in noting that top schools need to make diversity a priority, and that the tie between law school and student quality is not as strong as one would think. There is, however, a strong link between career prospects and school ranking. Since 2013, in response to the recession and the decline in law school enrollment, scholars have designed a number of websites dedicated to showing that lower ranked schools possess significant low bar passage rates than higher ranked schools, and students at lower ranked schools face more difficulty finding legal employment.

Today, simply attending law school does not sufficiently guarantee legal work at all, let alone high-paying legal work. The ABA, has sanctioned and forced the closure of a few schools that have sold the dream of becoming the lawyer without any results. Since the recession, the financial realities of the legal field stripped much of the law degree’s economic prestige. Still, to minority communities, the social benefit of becoming a lawyer is still alive and well. The centuries old prestige that came with a legal degree did not dissipate with a six-year recession or five years of school declining enrollment. Marginalized groups could still access the social benefits of becoming a lawyer even without the potential for economic gain. Law school enrollment may have eroded the past ten years, but schools that learn how to capitalize on a degree’s social benefit can still succeed in today’s market.