The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recently released the Standard 509 Information Reports for all 196 ABA-accredited law schools and revealed a decline in first-year enrollments for 2023. The figures presented, however, have shown some inconsistencies, depending on the resources cited.
As initially released by the ABA on December 15, the 2023 first-year enrollment figures stood at 37,886. This marks a drop-off of 174 students or roughly 0.46% compared to the 2022 enrollment rate of 38,060 students.
Nevertheless, a different data set was later provided on the ABA’s statistics page on December 20. According to a spreadsheet available for download on this page, first-year enrollment for 2023 is listed as 38,921, indicating a more considerable decrease of 373 students or nearly 1% compared to 2022’s total first-year J.D. enrollment of 39,294. It remains unclear which dataset provides a more accurate depiction of the enrollment figures.
Further details are available here. But it’s worth noting that this inconsistency in data might raise questions about the substantiality of the decline in first-year law school enrollments.