Dean Matthew Diller was interviewed by Law.com about the slowdown in foreign attorneys who want to come to the United States to get an LL.M., and what’s contributing to that decline.
In a bid for clarity, I rang up Matthew Diller, dean at Fordham University School of Law. He cautioned that he doesn’t have national statistics on applications and enrollment of foreign students, but his anecdotal evidence points to a slowdown in the number of international students trying to come to the U.S. in the past two years.
“It feels to me like a more competitive market for strong international students among law schools,” he told me. “Our applications are probably flat or slightly down. They are certainly not growing.”
So what’s going on? Diller suspects it’s the result of a number of factors. Among them:
➤➤U.S. law schools are facing more competition from schools in other common law countries, namely Australia and the United Kingdom. Australia, for example, is a less expensive and closer alternative for students from Asia, while the U.K. is an easier option for European students.
➤➤The political climate in the U.S. is prompting more questions and concerns from potential foreign LL.M. students about how they will be treated here. Those questions rarely arose prior to the Trump administration, Diller told me. (I wrote a story about this phenomenon back in 2017.)
➤➤Foreign LL.M. students face more hurdles now in obtaining student visas, which Diller said may be the single biggest factor driving down international applications. He told me it’s not unusual for Fordham’s LL.M. students to have their visas issued right before the semester begins, or even during orientation.
➤➤The declining approval rate of H1B visas are also discouraging foreign attorneys who enroll in LL.M. programs in the hopes of remaining in the U.S. after graduation. Companies are increasingly less willing to shoulder the costs of those employer-sponsored visa at a time when fewer and fewer get approved, Diller told me.