r/OnlineLawSchools

From LSAC:

“Last month, we announced that, effective July 28, 2026, LSAC would no longer include grades from college-level courses completed while a candidate was in high school, often referred to as dual enrollment classes, in the LSAC GPA calculation. After careful review, we have decided to delay implementation of the policy until summer 2027, enabling candidates and law schools to adjust to the new policy.  

This change, which now will take effect for the 2027-2028 applicant cycle, recognizes that access to college-level courses varies widely among high schools. Furthermore, where access does exist, high school students may not understand whether and how grades earned in those courses could affect their applications to law school. Excluding such courses from the LSAC GPA calculation was intended to help ensure that all high school students, regardless of their motivation for taking college courses, could feel free to do so without concern over how it might affect their future law school enrollment.  

We heard a lot of support for the policy change, but we also heard concerns about whether prospective applicants had been provided adequate notice in approaching the 2026-2027 application cycle, and that is why we are delaying implementation.”

Source: https://www.lsac.org/blog/providing-more-time-adjust-lsac-gpa-changes

This post is part of a series I am writing on Tier 4 law schools and the legal job market.
I graduated from a Tier 4 law school in Michigan in 2013.  Yes, at the height of the law school bubble exploding.  I won’t say the word “burst” even though that’s the generally accepted term when any kind of market bubble reaches its zenith.  I was in it, and then on the front lines of a ruined legal job market with little actual experience in the legal field. 
It didn’t just burst. 
In fact, it didn’t just explode.
It imploded first, then exploded, and the remains turned into a black hole where tens of thousands of recent law school graduates’ dreams were sucked into, never to be seen again.
I began law school in January of 2010.  I had enrolled in a corrupt, delusional, predatory Tier 4 law school because they gave me a very large scholarship to attend, $60,000, and they were near my parents’ house who wanted me to live with them while I attended law school.  I had no idea that this law school was actually as corrupt, delusional, and predatory as they were.  I thought they were just an underdog lesser ranked school and that if you graduated and worked hard for a year or two, surely to make a middle class wage at least while doing so, that you could have anything the legal job market had to offer any other graduates.  Well I was wrong.
I also thought I had a safe bachelors degree to fall back on.  I was also wrong.
Going to a Tier 4 law school at any point in history is usually a bad idea.  The only time its not, in my opinion, is if you have a full, 100% scholarship, AND you can graduate in the top 5% of the class.  Other than that, even the better performing students are rolling the dice on their future, and the lower performing students don’t even get to have dice, their fate has already been determined, this is merely a sentencing hearing.
The first year, 2010, there still seemed to be hope.  Very few people knew how bad it was outside of law firm partners and some higher education watchdogs.  We still thought if we couldn’t find a job, we’d still be able to hang our own shingle and make okay money.  We didn’t know that not only would there not be enough jobs or the saturated legal JOB market, there also wouldn’t be enough WORK for solo practitioners to support themselves.
In 2010, there were still paid internships popping up in my law school email from our career center.  Not super well paid.  I remember one, a legal intern position at the Michigan Education Association, making $10 per hour.  I didn’t think seeing that email was going to be the last time I had a chance to make any money in the legal field until nearly 4 years later…….
According to Google AI, “the primary law school bubble burst in 2011–2013, following a peak in enrollment in 2010. First-year enrollment dropped dramatically by 24% over the next four years as employment data transparency exposed poor job outcomes and high tuition debt.”
2011 was when we started seeing a change.  No paid internship opportunities being emailed to us by the career center. 
By 2012, the quality of the entering 1L class had noticeably dropped.  We had already had low quality in academics and other areas with my class.  I was shocked when I found out most of my fellow students were paying full price to attend, I had figured it would be mostly scholarship students like me, because I mistakenly thought my law school had ethics.  LOL!
When I was a teaching assistant and had conversations with 1Ls I conducted review sessions for, it shocked me how, not trying to be mean here, low-caliber they were.  I was at my law school’s Ann Arbor campus talking to a 1L from Pennsylvania.  We had arrived on the ethnic make-up of Michigan, and I was telling her how Michigan had a lot of rich cultural heritage that included Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Chaldean, and other ethnicities not found everywhere in the USA.  She responded “Well Pennsylvania is full of MEXICANS!  They’re EVERYWHERE and I HATE IT!”  I felt an atomic level of cringe in that moment.  This was a person who was going to be someone’s attorney someday?!  Who I was trying to teach criminal law? 
In the second half of 2012, I had to compete to find an unpaid externship to finish my JD.  I applied at 12 different unpaid work at various agencies and law firms.  Only one, a district court in a low-income high-crime smaller city, interviewed and hired me to work for free.  The rest didn’t even interview me because they were so full of unpaid law students and unpaid law school graduates desperately trying to get experience, that they simply did not have physical room for me.
When I graduated, I could not get a legal assistant, law clerk, or paralegal job because there were none available.  Many law clerk jobs were now requiring YEARS of experience as a practicing attorney to get them.  I remember one that was posted for the Livingston County Family Court.  It was a $42,000 per year law clerk job that required THREE years of experience as a practicing family law attorney to even get an interview.
I have personally known many attorneys from this time who worked for years as severely underpaid attorneys just to get a court law clerk job that was stable, had benefits, and had yearly pay raises.
I do not post this to be bitter, to seek attention, or to sulk in negativity.  I’ve had a great life since I left the legal field.  I post this to warn and alert others.  The legal job market is under attack from new forces, namely AI and non-attorney “legal consultants” taking away work and jobs.  We may also be on the verge of the laws changing so that non-attorneys can own law firms, which has been one of the last barriers to even lower compensation for many attorneys than we have already seen.  Because of my experience and the experience of people I know, love, and care about, I do not recommend that anyone who wants to be a lawyer attend a Tier 4 law school.
I want to close with some numbers of how bad the legal job market was after I graduated in 2013.
$35,000 – This was the going rate for a new associate attorney at any of the few law firms that were hiring new attorneys in Michigan in 2013.  And this wasn’t just for Tier 4 graduates.  Tier 3 and Tier 2 graduates were also getting this rate. 
$18,000- This was the yearly income of numerous solo practitioners who graduated law school shortly before, inside, or shortly after the bubble whom I met or was told about.  None of these people knew one another, so they couldn’t have collaborated to make up some number. 
1 for every 7 – This was the number of legal jobs for every seven attorneys searching for work in Michigan at the time.  For every 7 attorneys looking for work, there was 1 job that was hiring.
$250,000 – The amount of total student debt that around a dozen graduates whom I personally knew had after finishing law school.  Some couldn't pass the bar exam.

Is demand decreasing? A couple of programs are staying above water but most online law schools are struggling beneath the weight of poor student outcomes.