More and More People Taking Interest in Graduate School

Now that job losses are on the up, there are more people considering the alternative of working. Graduate school is one such alternative. Recently, a lot of legal blogs as well as other publications have begun reporting that the application for law school has increased for this year compared to last year. The publication The National Law Journal also mentions that their applications were up by around four percent. A blog called the Legal Writing Prof Blog also claims that it has seen a report that has been password protected that indicates that February 27’s year-to-date applications for law school are high by four point three percent in many private institutions and two point four percent up at other public law schools.

The Numbers Say it All

The National Law Journal also goes on to say that even when the applications are up, the number of their applicants had also increased a little than one percent. Putting it simply, the applications had gone up simply because there are people who had decided to post applications at more than one school. The seasons for applications are not over of course.  The number of individuals who have applied for the LSAT or the Law School Admission Test shows that law school seems to be quite attractive in terms of alternative options. The publicly available data that shows numbers of test takers are from the Law School Admission Council. It also shows that law school testing is on the high for the year and that it had also experienced an increase from the previous year even with the recession taking full blast.

More Facts and Figures

The publicly available information provided by the Graduate Management Admission Council, a group that administers testing for application to business school (the GMAT or Graduate Management Admission Test), does not cover all information regarding the application for school year 2008-2009. However, it does show an uptick compared to the findings from the last recession. A lot of business schools are also allowing their applicants to turn in scores from their Graduate Record Examination – which is a general standardized test that is primarily used for their admission into different academic and postgraduate programs. The statistics from the GRE are released every year so it is pretty difficult to compare the results of that with the LSAT or the GMAT. As earlier mentioned, the testing of GRE also shows that there is a slight decrease from 2008 compared to 2007. The spokesman for the Education Testing Service also says that such numbers may also be distorted because the ETS had earlier announced plans of revamping the test itself back in 2007 – so people who had been preparing for this examination may think twice in taking it.