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We’ve written before about the declining interest in law school, as evidenced by the number of people taking the Law School Admission Test and the number applying to law schools. Over at the Associate’s Mind blog, Keith Lee notes that the number of applicants is down across the board, but the drop-off is particularly sharp among people who went to elite schools for their bachelor’s degrees.

He looked at graduates of the Ivies and three other schools (Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago); I’ve done a similar analysis, but included the top 20 national universities as ranked by U.S. News that send a substantial number of alumni to law school each year. (Note that M.I.T. and Caltech, which are top-ranked national universities by U.S. News, are not included in this analysis because they are not among the top 240 biggest feeders to law schools for which the Law School Admission Council releases data.)

Across the board, the number of people applying to matriculate in fall 2012 was 67,700, down about 17 percent from the number who applied to matriculate in fall 2008 (82,000).

The average decline in applicants who graduated from the “elite” schools was 28 percent.

U.S. News National Universities Ranking Feeder School Applicants to Law School for Fall 2008 Applicants to Law School for Fall 2012 Decline (%) 1 Harvard 357 251 30% 1 Princeton 209 172 18% 3 Yale 320 234 27% 4 Columbia 231 190 18% 4 University of Chicago 212 175 17% 6 Stanford 262 179 32% 8 University of Pennsylvania 416 324 22% 8 Duke 304 233 23% 10 Dartmouth 195 171 12% 12 Northwestern 330 230 30% 13 Johns Hopkins 156 105 33% 14 Washington University in St. Louis 248 167 33% 15 Brown 249 177 29% 15 Cornell 534 314 41% 17 Rice University 135 67 50% 17 University of Notre Dame 348 232 33% 17 Vanderbilt 281 232 17% 20 Emory 325 211 35%

Among all 240 feeder schools that the Law School Admission Council releases data for, Rice had the biggest decline; 135 of its alumni applied to matriculate in fall 2008, but only about half that number applied for the fall 2012 semester.

I’m not sure why graduates with bachelor’s degrees from these higher-ranked universities have shown larger declines in interest in law school. Maybe they have access to better career services offices, which informed them that opportunities for newly minted lawyers have declined. Or maybe the range of jobs available to them in nonlegal fields has recovered faster than that for most college graduates, so the Ivy Leaguers feel less pressure to wait out the terrible job market by enrolling in law school. Or maybe it’s just coincidence.

I should note, by the way, that among the 240 feeder schools the Law School Admission Council tracks, there were 55 feeder schools that saw their alumni law school applicants increase; 22 schools had percentage increases in the double-digits.

Among the schools with the biggest increases in percentage terms were Florida Gulf Coast University, Liberty University, Sam Houston State University, Utah Valley University and the University of New Mexico. Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences (a program founded in 2006) and Kaplan University (where enrollment grew sharply in the early years of the 2000s) had the biggest increases in the number of their graduates who applied to law school.