Mississippi Burning ...up the Job Market!

And with the birth of Jesus, your apostle at the LSTC is ready to return to bringing you the Good News, this time from the land of Colonel Sartoris.

From the Jackson Free Press (ed.: as opposed to...?): 

The University of Mississippi School of Law's first-year enrollment has dropped from 199 in 2010, to 156 in 2012 and just 127 students this year.

The decrease was intentional.

Officials began reducing their class sizes at a time when a recovering economy and improving job market began to lure potential students away from law school.

Emphasis added.  See, kids, your "scamblogger" "friends" are telling you that law schools have had to slash enrollment because law school isn't worth it.  Au contraire.  As our friends in Mississippi are telling us, it's because the economy is going so darn good that it's luring students away from law school like Pied Pipers or Sirens or pick your analogy.

Of course, they understand math, too:

"We were much more concerned about placement. If we had a large class that impacts the profession in a negative way when the market isn't real strong for lawyers. What we've found by getting smaller is placement percentages have gone up," law school dean Richard Gershon told The Sun Herald.

Last year, about 85 percent of the law school graduates had a job in the legal field nine months after graduation, Gershon said.

Wow, that sounds excellent!  I mean, their law school transparency numbers are significantly lower (NALP 2013 = 71% bar passage required), but I'm happy Gershon - who the internet says is a pioneer of Charleston School of Law - is here to give us the straight dope without cutting it with malicious anti-law school lies.

"One thing I've found that keeps me optimistic is that people applying, getting in and going to law school really want to be in law school," Gershon said.

 Thank God we're finally getting people who really really really want to be lawyers, as opposed to the class of 2008, whose members were obviously just throwing three years of their lives away, in a much better non-legal employment market, to only sort-of want to be lawyers.  Maybe that's a byproduct of making residents spend around $100k for a public school law degree?

I just hope the improving job market for undergraduates doesn't lure them away.  Otherwise, Mississippi just may run out of lawyers.  So the next time you're in Biloxi or Tupelo, please make sure you talk up the virtues of buying from China or India.  Things simply can't go so well that we risk not having enough lawyers to stock the yellow pages and bench backs.