Significant but Unheralded Growth of Large Externship Programs

Law schools have offered student externships for several decades. The number of participating students has fluctuated over time. At first, more law students participated in externships than in in-house clinics, but that changed in the 1980s and remained consistent for many years. Starting in the early- to mid-1990s, externship enrollment surpassed in-house-clinic participation again and has continued to increase in the past decade, each year widening the gap between these two primary forms of practice-based experiential learning.

Today, externships have never been more important as a means of providing practical legal education to the current generation of law students.