Students on a roll

Nearly 19,000 students graduated with law degrees from universities in England and Wales in 2021, the highest number on record. Not all will become lawyers, but any fears that the profession will struggle to accommodate those who do may well be misplaced. The number of solicitors continues to soar. A decade ago there were 169,000 people on the roll. Today there are 219,000. If mirrored across British industry as a whole, a growth rate like that would instantly resolve Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal difficulties.

Why the huge increase in law degrees? Far more go to university nowadays and many more institutions offer them, of course. And I doubt that many intellectually capable teenagers trouble themselves to assess whether there will be room at the Inn (sic) when the time comes. Newspaper headlines trumpeting City partner earnings nudging £40,000 a week may be more influential.

But there is more to it than that. The surge also reflects altered expectations and a perceived ‘flight to quality’ in tertiary education. Today the average student will graduate nursing debts of £50,000-plus, which is a daunting sum to behold when you’re in your early 20s. A student’s relationship with a higher education institution is now strictly transactional. That simply wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Law is viewed as a ‘banker’, literally and metaphorically.

To do what I did myself – study an agreeable humanity in the vague expectation that something would turn up – would be reckless now. My generation’s horizons were bigger. We could afford to take risks that many of today’s sixth-formers cannot. My university contemporaries immediately bought property when they took their first job. Agreeable city centre flats were then available for £40k – not much, even back in the 90s. We really didn’t worry about stuff like that.

That said, if you’re going to do a vocational degree that is stimulating as well as potentially remunerative, then Law remains an excellent choice – which further explains its appeal. As the profession continues to prosper amid (or perhaps even because of) renewed economic turmoil, expect the number of Year 13s opting to study the subject to continue climbing.