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After IB, aspirations continue. People either want to study abroad, or at universities like Ashoka or Jindal. This is a sea change from before, when people from elite families aspired to get into IIT, IIM, NLSIU etc. Nowadays, they are just not interested. Even if a kid is very bright, he or she would rather aim for a good engineering degree in a top 50 US University over even a top 3 IIT.
Won’t this eventually harm NLUs?
First, reservations across various categories.
Second, the indiscriminate establishment of an NLU in almost every state. Maharashtra alone has two National Law Universities. When a “national” university exists in every state, the inevitable consequence is a dilution of standards across institutions, as talent is spread too thinly.
Further, private institutions such as Jindal Global Law School offer highly competitive pay packages to qualified professionals who are inclined to teach. This has drawn serious academic talent away from public universities and has further contributed to the decline in their standards.
I foresee a market-driven consolidation and correction in the years to come. These universities have produced a glut of attorneys, the vast majority of whom are underutilised due to a lack of good-quality, well-paying work. Most such work remains concentrated in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, and is largely cornered by established law firms or senior practitioners breaking away from them.
A significant number of graduates are unable to secure law-firm or in-house roles. Instead, they are pushed into:
(a) lower-court litigation with fewer matters—an area particularly vulnerable to being disrupted or replaced by AI; or
(b) outsourced paralegal or secretarial work from the UK and the USA, often after spending considerable sums to qualify in those jurisdictions.
Only a very small fraction eventually secure quality law-firm or in-house roles overseas.
All told, we have produced—and continue to produce—far more lawyers than even tomorrow’s India will realistically need. There is no clear North Star, except the illusion of a high-paying starting salary of ₹1 lakh per month and the distant dream of becoming a partner earning ₹1 crore per annum.
Following one’s passion and succeeding monetarily is realistically possible only for a small elite—graduates from schools like Doon or Mayo—those with generational wealth to cushion risk and failure.
The overall situation is a mess.
Your comment about too many NLUs is also correct. When tier 2 IITs and IIMs are struggling with placements, what hope do tier 2 and 3 NLUs have? We should have has no more than 5 NLUs in India, each admitting no more than 100 students per batch.