Karen Sloan, Legal Education Editor and Senior Writer at ALM, has published the first part of a series, The Big Fail, examining significantly higher numbers of law school graduates who fail the bar exam for Law.com.

Quoted verbatim below, Sloan reaches conclusions that are disconcerting.

“While their circumstances vary somewhat, most of those schools with pass-rate declines larger than 20 percent have experienced significant drops in their enrollment and applicants, as well as difficulties in helping graduates find legal jobs—making for a toxic stew of challenges.

The cause of the decline is multifaceted, but it’s clear that waning demand for a law degree has played a key role. From 2010 to 2016, the national applicant pool shrank 36 percent—in part due to a contraction in the entry-level legal job market and newfound attention on jobless law grads with staggering amounts of student debt. As a result, the falloff in applicants with high LSAT scores was particularly steep.

Because of legal education’s declining popularity, schools have needed to reach deeper into their applicant pools to fill out their classes, or they were forced to reduce the number of new students they enrolled. Many campuses employed a combination of both strategies.

The upshot is that incoming law students on the whole had lower LSAT scores and undergraduate grades than their predecessors.”

And fewer and fewer of these students pass the bar.

To read the first installment, see The Big Fail.