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Overenrolment in Canadian schools?


buoy

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buoy
  • Law School Admit

With the overenrolment chaos south of the border this cycle (Boston College, UPenn, UT Austin, Columbia, Duke...), is there any indication Canadian schools have similarly misjudged their admissions numbers this year? Columbia's email to accepted students blamed their overenrolment on a lack of competing opportunities that normally lead to deferrals or rejections of offers (fellowships, jobs, travel, etc). Seems Canadian applicants would be facing the same issues, but I haven't heard of any Canadian schools admitting to overenrolment or offering incentives for deferrals yet

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Gamgee
  • Law Student
2 minutes ago, buoy said:

With the overenrolment chaos south of the border this cycle (Boston College, UPenn, UT Austin, Columbia, Duke...), is there any indication Canadian schools have similarly misjudged their admissions numbers this year? Columbia's email to accepted students blamed their overenrolment on a lack of competing opportunities that normally lead to deferrals or rejections of offers (fellowships, jobs, travel, etc). Seems Canadian applicants would be facing the same issues, but I haven't heard of any Canadian schools admitting to overenrolment or offering incentives for deferrals yet

This likely won't be a problem with Canadian schools. I believe here they take a more conservative approach to sending out acceptances, unlike the states where there are so many choices & scholarship offers will cause large fluctuations in acceptances. There's no need to worry unless schools start announcing they've over-enrolled.

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Aureliuse
  • Lawyer

Not to add to anyone's anxiety. But I think the elephant in the room is the law market post-COVID.

The real worry is whether the post-COVID job market have room for the graduating classes of 2021 and 2022.

Edited by Aureliuse
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Renerik
  • Law Student
5 minutes ago, RUIQ said:

I believe here they take a more conservative approach

Don't remember the source but one of Thinking LSAT/Spivey Consulting mentioned that this cycle American schools sent more acceptances, and sooner. With increased LSAT scores, of course some schools received more above median scores than usual. A few threads on r/lawschooladmisions shows that for some schools they sent out 80% of their acceptances before 01-Jan-21.  

The data is fragmented across a bunch of PDFs I've got on my PC but looking at historical trends for Canadian schools, the number of posters in the accepted threads at the 2-3 Canadian schools I have saved since the 2018-2019 cycle has remained constant. So I don't think Canadian schools participated in the same bull race. Further, given that a lot of Canadian schools start sending out acceptances later than American schools, they could see LSAT inflation numbers clearer when LSAC released their volume summaries later in the cycle.

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Kashi
  • Law Student
2 minutes ago, Aureliuse said:

Not to add to anyone's anxiety. But I think the elephant in the room is the law market post-COVID.

The real worry is whether the post-COVID job market have room for the graduating classes of 2021 and 2022.

Huh? 2020/2021 has seen literally the best job market for lawyers since 2006/2007 (or so I've been told).

There are certainly issues with the job market in Ontario due to the oversupply of law students, particularly in Ontario with increasing class sizes and the opening up of Ryerson. So there are issues on that front. But, to the best of my knowledge, that doesn't really have to do with COVID. 

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Aureliuse
  • Lawyer
3 minutes ago, Kashi said:

Huh? 2020/2021 has seen literally the best job market for lawyers since 2006/2007 (or so I've been told).

There are certainly issues with the job market in Ontario due to the oversupply of law students, particularly in Ontario with increasing class sizes and the opening up of Ryerson. So there are issues on that front. But, to the best of my knowledge, that doesn't really have to do with COVID. 

Firms are looking for lawyers with 4-5+ years of post-call experience. I agree that the demand exceeds supply in certain practices for lawyers with those years of experience or more.

The market for new calls and juniors in some practice areas are rough.

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Toad
  • Lawyer
19 minutes ago, Kashi said:

Huh? 2020/2021 has seen literally the best job market for lawyers since 2006/2007 (or so I've been told).

There are certainly issues with the job market in Ontario due to the oversupply of law students, particularly in Ontario with increasing class sizes and the opening up of Ryerson. So there are issues on that front. But, to the best of my knowledge, that doesn't really have to do with COVID. 

At the University of Alberta, I heard that around 14% of the class of 2021 is still looking for articles. This is consistent with the Employment Playbook that Career Services sent us all in 1L that stated that around 85-90% of the class graduate with articles in a typical year.

This year seems like it will be fairly typical in terms of the percentage of students graduating with articles.

The issue seems to be that despite many areas of law booming, it is not translating into articling positions in some areas. Family law and immigration are completely dead for articles despite both being booming business-wise. Criminal law seems to be doing fine. Almost every personal injury firm seems to be hiring 1-2 articling students this year. Small general practice firms seem to be hiring an average amount of students. Big and medium law firms seem to be doing great.

 

 

 

Edited by Toad
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AtticusFlinch
  • Law Student
4 hours ago, Kashi said:

Huh? 2020/2021 has seen literally the best job market for lawyers since 2006/2007 (or so I've been told).

There are certainly issues with the job market in Ontario due to the oversupply of law students, particularly in Ontario with increasing class sizes and the opening up of Ryerson. So there are issues on that front. But, to the best of my knowledge, that doesn't really have to do with COVID. 

I mean just because the law profession has been able to adapt to covid-19 doesn't change the fact there are obvious issues with the profession going forward. Most people understand there is a huge surplus of lawyers right now, particularly in places like Toronto and the GTA. That alone is a gigantic problem with the job market let alone the myriad other challenges the profession faces more broadly. 

Thankfully law careers are flexible and not like teaching where you're truly screwed if you can't find a job in the field. 

Edited by AtticusFlinch
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BCLaw2021
  • Lawyer

I don't understand how over enrolment can occur on a conceptual basis - can someone explain this to me?

Law school as a certain X amount of spots, makes X amount of offers. 

Law school has Y amount of spots on a waiting list. 

Law school offers fills all students who reject its offer with other students on the waiting list.

Over enrolment can never mathematically happen.  

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TobyFlenderson
  • Lawyer

Schools don't offer exactly the number of open spots. They over-offer, expecting some portion of those offers to be declined. Over-enrolment happens when less people decline offers than they expected. Instead of, say, 120 offers for 100 spots, with 20 people expected to decline, you end up with 100 spots, 120 offers, and 110 acceptances. That's why it happens. They can (usually) expect that sending 100 offers for 100 spots will, with near certainty, leave spots open. So they over-offer, and in the case of TRU, 42 people didn't free up their spaces as expected.

 

 

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Toad
  • Lawyer

Schools send out more offers than there are seats because not everyone accepts their offer and because some people who initially accept their offer may withdraw after a preferable option becomes available. Schools would lose out on good candidates and greatly extend the length of their admission cycle if they only sent out enough offers to fill up their class under the assumption that everyone will accept.

"Yield rate" refers to the percentage of students offered admission who ultimately enroll at a school. I don't believe statistics are available for Canadian schools, but in the United States the yield rate varies between around 80% for Yale all the way down to 10% for some lower ranked schools.

The issue that TRU likely ran into is that many students consider it a backup school. This means that people are likely to decline their offer or withdraw when they receive an acceptance elsewhere. This makes it logical for TRU to head into late spring-early summer with more offers than seats available. Unfortunately, the pandemic and the associated increase in competitiveness seems to have decreased the late cycle mobility that tends to happen. The end result is 42 people getting screwed.

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BlushAndTheBar
  • Law Student
On 6/10/2021 at 3:06 PM, Kashi said:

Huh? 2020/2021 has seen literally the best job market for lawyers since 2006/2007 (or so I've been told).

There are certainly issues with the job market in Ontario due to the oversupply of law students, particularly in Ontario with increasing class sizes and the opening up of Ryerson. So there are issues on that front. But, to the best of my knowledge, that doesn't really have to do with COVID. 

I was also told many lawyers are abandoning Toronto for New York City- but this was my general understanding from skimming LawStudents.ca and I could be wrong. 

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ZineZ
  • Lawyer
2 hours ago, BlushAndTheBar said:

I was also told many lawyers are abandoning Toronto for New York City- but this was my general understanding from skimming LawStudents.ca and I could be wrong. 

The word "many" needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There are some people moving, sure. But I haven't seen any indications of it being a larger trend. 

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buoy
  • Law School Admit
On 6/18/2021 at 11:49 PM, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ said:

I call Miss Thompson Rivers to the stand

I have a nasty feeling TRU might just be the tip of the iceberg. There's already been a pattern of overenrolment in the States, and if there's one Canadian school in the same boat, I don't see why others wouldn't be as well. At least those with low yields, and maybe even most schools. I haven't seen much (any?) movement on waitlist threads (but I'm a newb, so maybe that's normal at this time of year)

Hopefully if other schools are overenrolled they'll have more creative solutions than TRU

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TomHagen
  • Applicant

USask overenrolled by 12 per an email sent to all incoming 1L's today. They are honouring all acceptances but offering up to 12 students a chance to defer on a first-come first-serve basis. 

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dimsum1
  • Law School Admit
On 6/24/2021 at 5:09 PM, TomHagen said:

USask overenrolled by 12 per an email sent to all incoming 1L's today. They are honouring all acceptances but offering up to 12 students a chance to defer on a first-come first-serve basis. 

If they're honouring all of them, why would anyone want to defer?  Or am I mis-reading "honouring acceptances"?

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TomHagen
  • Applicant
2 hours ago, dimsum1 said:

If they're honouring all of them, why would anyone want to defer?  Or am I mis-reading "honouring acceptances"?

It depends on the person, I assume some people might want to take a year to work/travel and enjoy knowing they have a spot in law school next fall. 

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Telephantasm
On 6/10/2021 at 3:00 PM, Aureliuse said:

The real worry is whether the post-COVID job market have room for the graduating classes of 2021 and 2022.

This varies heavily by market and field. BigLaw corporate departments are taking in bigger classes than usual because the transactional market during COVID has been booming. As far as I can tell, the same cannot be said for government jobs and a lot of litigation.

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