Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern; Google Scholar), Law School Applications Are Way Up! Let's Wait on the Parade:

Let the bells ring out during this holiday season . . . for American law schools. Especially those schools who fret about enrolling a sufficient number of students and, further, students whose hard and soft measures promise that they will have a good chance of succeeding. Applications are up thus far, way up, and signs point to an abundance of riches for law schools more or less across the board. Moreover, concerns about minority student enrollment, concerns turbocharged by the Supreme Court’s decision restricting the use of racial preferences, are ameliorated by the evidence (at least thus far) that minority applications are up by a considerable margin.

While this is not the space to throw cold water on what is good news for law schools in their business objectives, I urge a pause to at least warn the collective us in legal education not to fall into the too-familiar trap of seeing the currently bullish market as an excuse of complacency, as an opportunity to eschew innovation because business-as-usual apparently is meeting the tenor of the times.

Let’s be clear that a run up in applications doesn’t make any serious headway in addressing persistent problems …

• Sticky and mainly ignored is the traditional financial aid models of law school, models that invest greatly in merit-based aid for high flyer applicants on the idea that such students will be subsidized by below-median score students who will pay full freight. …
• Efficiencies and innovation in pedagogy should be important goals, in both rainy and sunny times. …

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