High-paying salaries, prestige and furthering academic and career goals were at the top of the list for why students wanted to go to law school over a decade ago. But these days, most students say the thing inspiring them is a desire to do good.
“Students and pre-applicants are primarily motivated by external factors, and what’s driving them to go to law school is advocating for social justice and helping others,” says Liz Bodamer, director of research for the Law School Admission Council.
LSAC began collecting data in 2018, and over that time the motivating factors for law students have remained consistent. Based on results from LSAC’s 2022 matriculant survey, which will be coming out later this year, Bodamer says almost 70% of respondents reported social justice, helping others or uplifting their community as the main drivers for them to attend law school.
That constitutes a change: According to a 2010 study by the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, the most influential factors for students deciding to attend law school were the desire to have a challenging and rewarding career, furthering their academic development and working toward financial security. Less than 50% of first-year law students said contributing to the public good strongly influenced their decision to attend.
Students and Law Schools Share Goals
While student motivation may have shifted over the years, LSAC’s senior director of prelaw engagement, Kyle McEntee, says in many ways student interests now are a good match for what law schools have been doing all along.
“Law schools see themselves as engines for social change and have for decades,” McEntee says. “You see this in the way law schools advocate their services, the types of clinics they are investing in, the types of externships they are encouraging their students to partake in.”
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At the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, socially minded students have had access to such opportunities for decades.
For nearly 20 years the school has run a critical race studies specialization for future lawyers who want to focus on racial justice. And since 1973, El Centro Legal has been a student-coordinated volunteer program that matches more than 200 law students with clients across Los Angeles, exposing students to a variety of issues from immigration to juvenile justice.
Bayrex Martí, the assistant dean for student affairs at UCLA Law, says there have always been students who arrive on campus with a desire to make a difference in the world. But what’s changed over the last few years is how they want to do so.
“It was broader before,” Martí says. “They wanted to make a difference, but not necessarily in specific areas. But now I feel like at least here, students come in saying they want to work in education policy or immigration policy or environmental justice. They come with this narrower lens and that feels like a difference from 10 years ago.”
That specificity is reflected in some of UCLA Law’s latest offerings, including the recently formed Center for Immigration Law and Policy and the brand new Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy.
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Diversifying the Legal Field
Along with the shift in student motivation for attending law school has come a shift in the diversity of students applying to and attending law school. According to an LSAC survey, the class of 2022 was the most racially and ethnically diverse group in history.
Gayla Jacobson, executive director of admissions at CUNY School of Law in New York City, says that at CUNY and law schools around the country, “you definitely saw the number of applications increase from populations that were historically excluded,” including communities of color and LGBTQ students.
Part of that growth can be attributed to the pandemic, which, in addition to delaying the decision of many applicants to pursue a law degree, also “motivated them because of health, racial, economic and other inequalities they witnessed during the pandemic; or recommitted their support of their families and communities,” Martí wrote in an email.
Jacobson also points to the impact of important social movements over the last few years, like the protests following the murder of George Floyd by police, in driving students to want to attend law school. At CUNY, many students have felt the repercussions of legal injustice firsthand.
“I think our students in general, they come from neighborhoods and communities and families where they have seen the impact of the law on their lives, and the way some of these systems, whether it’s immigration or the family court system, have had really negative impacts on families and communities,” says Nicole Smith Futrell, CUNY associate law professor and director of the Center for Diversity in the Legal Profession. “Students want the legal training to go back and share that information in the places they come from.”
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Jacobson is particularly proud of the work CUNY has done to expand access to law school to those who have personally been involved with the legal system. In 2020, CUNY voted to remove a question about an applicant’s criminal history from the school’s application, an effort pushed largely by members of CUNY’s Formerly Incarcerated Law Students Advocacy Association.
“By attracting people who have experience within the system, we are then able to give them the credentials and tools and a seat at the table to effect the kind of change someone who hasn’t been part of the system wouldn’t even know needed to be changed,” Jacobson says. “We’re putting the people with the most intimate knowledge (in positions) to create a system that’s more fair, more just and more humanizing.”
Finding Ways to Do Good
While many students enter law school with a passion for social justice work, that desire doesn’t always translate into jobs students ultimately pursue.
“This has been a challenge for students going back a few decades,” McEntee says. “Legal education is so expensive and such an investment of time and money that often students enter law school and by the time they leave, it’s not necessarily their ambitions have changed, but the financial reality of repaying financial loans hits them like a ton of bricks.”
Some students are able to pursue their passions without the burden of loans. McEntee says programs like the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program help. At CUNY, the Breaking Barriers Scholarship is awarded to students committed to a career in public interest law.
“We want to make sure our neediest students who intend to do the work can do so,” Jacobson says.
But even for students who end up making choices based on finances, that doesn’t mean abandoning work in social justice. “Even those not doing it full time, whether it’s through pro bono work or other forms of service not through their employer, they are still maintaining” their passion after law school, Martí says.
Bodamer adds that, in addition to volunteering, students who end up in high-paying corporate positions might find that “big law gives them the financial freedom to give back to their community.”
And even if that first job is a far cry from the passionate interests students may have entered law school with, it doesn’t mean their original motivations for entering law have to be abandoned.
“Students have to remember that a career is a trajectory, and I’ve seen folks go into a job or sector for a short period of time and then switch,” Bodamer says.
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How Students’ Motivations for Attending Law School Have Changed originally appeared on usnews.com
