As the days grow their darkest and coldest, a beacon of hope cuts through the gloom to harken the arrival of hope.

Yea, warily, look to the Midwest—to your social media channels!—and see that the Assistant Dean of Admissions at Northwestern Pritzker Law is tweeting old Soul Train clips. You shall then know that the admission wave is nigh and the light of the season is coming. Time to bust a move!

With the holidays upon us and movement afoot, let’s take a few minutes to take stock of the law school admissions landscape before we all head out for the holidays (/finalize our last round of applications).

The Wave Hits the Shores

As we’ve been eagerly anticipating, a number of law school admissions offices finally gave the people what they wanted. Last week, we saw initial decisions up and down the rankings. Schools that joined the party included:

At this point, we’re waiting on just a few schools to send out their first round of decisions. Some are totally expected (since Harvard publishes their decision dates every year while Stanford fairly regularly admits their first wave in January) while others are a smidge surprising (like Cornell, who sent out several waves of decisions through November and December last year).

While acknowledging that it’s still early, the tea leaves thus far seem to indicate that schools are trying to maintain their stats. If we review lawschooldata profiles for schools like NYU, Michigan, Georgetown, and Berkeley, we see distinct trends for both the x- and y-axes at last year’s medians. Admitted so heavily at those numbers now would make it nearly impossible to try and bump the medians later. However, it is still possible that schools could try to fall back if local and national application trends don’t break their way. We don’t expect that to be the case, but we also didn’t expect that applications would be pushed back due to tech issues on the August and September LSATs. Speaking of which….

National App Figures

The previous wave we were so focused on were post-November LSAT applications. While it’s no longer a WAVE wave, the water is still gently lapping at the shores. Last week’s numbers from LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report had us at +3.9% for applicants and -3.3% for applications for the year. This week, on the other hand:

Both categories continue to inch up a smidge. The next big wave—if there is one—is typically over the holidays. The larger population of law school applicants (current college students) arrive home after final exams have wrapped up, encounter a large number of (mostly) well-meaning family members asking them what they plan to do with their lives after graduation, and start submitting applications like crazy prior to going back to school. As we see on LSAC’s Five Year Volume report, the wave’s greatest acceleration is in January:

But that’s a smidge deceiving. These totals come from the last day of each month. December tends to be a “back-loaded” month with students submitting apps after the semester ends. January tends to be “front-loaded” with everyone trying to get those apps done before returning to school. We’ll have a much greater sense of the national outlook for the year when we publish our next blog in two weeks.

Meanwhile, applicants in the T14-range of 170+ continue to lag per the Current Volume Summaries report:

ABA 509 Reports – FINALLY!

Continuing the theme of giving the people what they want, the ABA finally published everyone’s 509 Reports—huzzah!

For the newbies to this blog, every school is required via ABA Standard 509 to publish a number of statistics in a standardized manner. This saves prospective students TONS of time scouring individual websites for information. This also undercuts the narrative that U.S. News & World Report kept making regarding the essential nature of its rankings last year—why rely on USNWR when consumers have access to all this information for free and can determine the factors that are most important to them? This was—like—THE biggest conversation of the last admissions cycle.

But now that we have our 509 Reports in hand, we can finally get official stats on things like:

  • Enrolling class size
  • Medians
  • GRE-only enrollees
  • “Non-traditional” enrollees (i.e., Harvard’s JDP)
  • Average scholarship awards
  • Demographics for each class by gender, race, and US citizenship status (i.e., are some schools more friendly than others to enrolling international students?)
  • Transfer students

If you’re trying to compare some stats across a number of schools, we recommend downloading the Excel tables in the “All Schools Data” section. For the Pivot Table Wizards out there, this will help you visualize your data a bit quicker than pulling up individual reports.

See You in 2024!

But with the holiday season now arriving on our doorstep like a package from Amazon, we will bid you adieu for two weeks. It is likely to be a slow period of time—as referenced last week, many admissions offices will simply be closed while others will operate on skeleton staffs and limited hours. It’s possible to see a few more decisions come out on December 20th, 21st, and 22nd, but that will probably be it until January 3rd, 4th, and 5th (but, more realistically, the second week of January). We wish you and your loved ones a safe and wonderful holiday season! Good luck as you handle conversations with those (mostly) well-meaning family members!