Graves Concerns

This had nothing to do with data security, but I couldn’t resist the chance to obsess over some numbers. Last week, Mark Cohen at the Minnesota Lawyer blog posted a question that came up in a previous comment thread: are there too many law schools in Minnesota?

Whether we have too many law schools (or, more to the point, law students) is a slippery question. It’s like asking whether we have too many lawyers—it depends on whether you want to be one, or hire one.

I thought it might be interesting to compare the Twin Cities law school situation with other metro areas. Specifically, I wanted to look at two measures:

1. The number of new law graduates produced in each area per year, as a proportion of the total population of the area, and
2. The overall matriculation rate of the schools in each area.

The first is a measure of supply, from the legal market perspective—the higher an area’s per capita production of new grads compared to other areas, the more likely it is that the market may be oversaturated. The second measures demand—if far more students apply to schools than attend, there may be demand for more law school seats (from students, if not employers).

The results are listed below, based on data from the 2007 US Census data for primary statistical areas and the LSAC’s Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools. I combined some of the census’s primary areas where it made sense because of school locations. I included roughly the fifty largest areas (reduced a bit because of combining).

The results confirmed what a lot of people already think: the Twin Cities produces a relatively high number of law school grads compared to its population. The 936 graduates are 264.5 graduates per million in population. Only San Diego, Boston, and Washington, DC put out more law grads per capita. Boston and D.C. are probably net exporters of new lawyers, and D.C. may have more lawyers per-capita than anywhere else. That leaves San Diego as the only metro area producing significantly more law grads per capita than MSP—but note that Los Angeles, just a bit to the north of San Diego, has a particularly low rate of law grad production.

Number of law grads per million population:

That’s the supply side. On the demand side, Minneapolis-St. Paul ends up with the tenth highest matriculation rate per application—suggesting that law school applicants are more likely to be able to attend a school in the area than most. Also note that all the areas with higher Grads/Million rates have lower matriculation rates: 8.14% in Boston, 6.32% in DC, and 10.95% in San Diego.

Matriculation as a percentage of applications (the number of applications and matriculations are the total for all schools in the area):

This doesn’t prove Minnesota has too many law schools. But it does show that we put out a large number of law graduates for an area of our size, and it’s easier for students to get into a school here than in most cities. Whether that’s “too many” is left as an exercise for the economy.