Study reveals today’s students are abandoning law schools, opting for engineering-related studies instead

Per its annual US graduate school ranking study, US News has released data on the enrollment and tuition growth for the schools it reviews.

Before we get to the title, it should be noted that the study revealed today’s graduate student is faced with higher costs for continuing their studies than ever before. And yet, despite the significant financial strain these students are facing, it has not deterred enrollment, as most disciplines have seen a rise in overall registration per graduate-level study in recent years.

While you could certainly compare one discipline with another, perhaps the most peculiar comparison can be found in looking at those who opt for a legal education versus those interested in an engineering-based study. Regarding the former, getting a job as a lawyer has been a tough go in recent years; despite this difficulty, tuition for a degree in this field has risen by 66% since 2005 at private schools. For public schools, it has more than doubled:

This has, naturally, led to a decline in enrollment which has, in turn, led to a decline in salaries, and an overall contraction of the legal industry. Enrollment in a US-based law school program is now 93% of what it was in 2005, and that decline has picked up since 2012:

By contrast, a graduate degree in engineering from a US-based university is considerably less expensive than law school. And this is in spite of the fact that tuition for these programs has actually increased over the years — 47% at private schools since 2005, and 73% at public institutions:

The affordability of these programs coupled with the technology boom the industry has experienced in recent years has led to what can only be described as an explosion in enrollment in graduate-level engineering studies — a 38% increase, to be precise, since 2005. This passes the second fastest growing graduate discipline, medical school, by a substantial margin, as the latter has experienced only an 11% growth over the same period.

The popularity of graduate-level engineering programs has had a positive effect on the industry as a whole, as it’s led to degrees in these fields yielding the highest salary bumps and the lowest unemployment rates among all graduate study programs:

Via Quartz, US News