The study presents detailed data on the level of interest of college undergraduates in the USA in going to law school with data broken out by many personal variables including academic major, gender, age, income level of family of origin, SAT/ACT scores, political convictions, race/ethnicity, religion and many others. It also breaks out interest in law school by the institutional variables of type or Carnegie class, public/private status, tuition level and total enrollment. Data in the report is based on a survey of 1,289 full time college students at 4-year colleges in the United States.
In open ended questions, survey respondents name the academic major that they feel would best prepare them for law school and the law schools to which they are most likely to apply. Law schools mentioned are tabulated by the ACT/SAT scores of the survey respondents so that end users of the report can find out how many times particular law schools were mentioned as likely application targets by students at different levels of standardized test results.
Just a few of the many findings of this report were that:
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Broken out by gender, nearly three times as many men as women in the sample had already applied to law school.
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Sixteen students in the sample planned to apply to Harvard Law School, the most of any school in the sample.
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Students who grew up in small cities with fewer than 350,000 inhabitants were significantly likelier to be interested in going to law school than those who grew up in major cities, suburbs or rural areas.
This is a critical resource for policy makers in law school as well as a unique data source for social scientists and other studying higher education.