Additionally, the National Math and Science initiative is focused on the dual goals of improving the quality of education and quantity of students: https://nms.org/Education/OurStrategy.aspx
STEM grads go into finance and consulting because that's where the pay is better. Meanwhile philosophy majors struggle to get any jobs.
Net - either we need more STEM majors because STEM is the only rigorous career path out there, or we should steer more folks in that direction.
This should be a sign to more people that science and engineering programs are places where you can solve real problems.
I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think about it - there's a huge number of unemployed or underemployed lawyers, legal costs remain sky-high, and most Americans can't afford a lawyer for very basic needs.
We force all lawyers to graduate from college without acquiring any particular background that is strictly necessary for the study of law, then force them to go through three years of very expensive graduate school, and in spite of that, many of them are almost completely incapable of practicing law or even finding reasonable employment when they graduate. It's a 7 year education path that results in an unemployable person while a substantial need for affordable services goes unmet.
1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord-tenant dispute is slightly different.
2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers (this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers). Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals with the desired experience.
The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law: http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-....
Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale. We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases, drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate person who can research things for them without getting threatened with charges of "practicing law without a license".
I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in (I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less (then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it).
I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her 4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep offering these services).
At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices. Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000 new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the ranks of experienced lawyers.
So you've got the training challenges already highlighted, the complexity of cases (the legal profession is the epitome of a profession in which people are managing complexity, much as software is), and a limited number of playing fields. It's as if you had to apply to a limited number of government-run computing facilities months in advance to get a few minutes of processing time -- much as mainframe computing was through the late 1980s, for many people, in fact (there's a reason PCs and minis took off like they did).