After consuming their chocolates and turning back to their computers, law school admissions officers continue to review applications and make decisions—even sending out a few Valentines to students in the form of admit letters and scholarship offers. Those processes went up a little bit this week, so let’s take our weekly lap around the comings and goings of the admissions world to see what’s going on.

National App Figures and LSAT Registrations

Like water tables rising as snow melts, our check-in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report is showing a slow but continued increase in national applications. After trailing for much of the autumn, slowly catching up in November and December, and finally breaking even last week, this week’s report shows that national apps are 0.5% ahead of this same day last year:

While we were keeping our eye on how the January LSAT may help boost national application figures, we were sleeping on the February LSAT. That exam occurred last week and registrations were up 24% per LSAC’s LSAT Registrant and Test Taker Volumes report:

The results of the February LSAT likely won’t affect the national applicant pool as drastically as January’s did for a few reasons:

  • There are simply fewer test takers (duh!).
  • A smaller percentage of February test takers tend to be “repeat” takers. About half the students taking the February LSAT are sitting for their first test. What this means is that these are not students looking to apply this year.
  • Some schools’ app deadlines have already passed. If a student was taking the February LSAT in the hopes of bumping their scores into range for places like Yale, Columbia, NYU, or UCLA, someone is going to have to break it to them.

Even with these caveats, it’s still possible that AdComms are lighting votive candles for the February LSAT test takers because of what we’re seeing with score bands per the Current Volume Summaries report:

Despite the continued drip-drip-drip of incoming applications, apps from the 170+ cohort remain short of last year’s pace.

All of this brings us to our next segment….

Scholarship Awards—What’s Up with Them?

More schools are beginning to roll out their merit aid awards, and this is leading to one of our favorite genres of Reddit posts: the incredulous scholarship comparison. The typical outline of such posts is:

  • I’ve been admitted to High-Ranked School and Lower-Ranked School.
  • High-Ranked School gave me more scholarship money than Lower-Ranked School.
  • I’m confused/angry/upset/hungry.

In this particular post, it’s:

  • I’ve been admitted to Michigan and Notre Dame.
  • I got $120,000 total from ND. But students with my stats got $165,000 last year [editor’s note: This is a twist! The poster has done some research on Notre Dame’s lawschooldata profile from last year!].
  • Michigan gave me more than Notre Dame.
  • Say what?!

So what gives when/if you run into these kinds of situations? What you’re seeing is a normal confluence of the basic economic principles of supply, demand, and goals.

When admissions officers construct their scholarship grids, they’re doing so based almost exclusively on internal factors such as trends in their applicant pool, financial resources for scholarships, institutional requirements for tuition revenue, and aspirational goals for stats and demographics. There’s typically some recognition of outside factors from other schools (i.e., being aware of your competitor’s scholarships) but those aren’t usually driving forces in creating the in-house scholarship grid for a school. Why? Because the school ultimately has to do what’s right for them to reach their goals.

So let’s go back to that Michigan-vs-Notre Dame example. I would guess that part of the audience’s initial incredulous reaction to matters is because of their training for LSAT Logic Games:

  • If School A is ranked higher than School B,
  • Then School B would need to give me a higher scholarship than School A to encourage me to attend.

And that’s true on the “tree level” of the student. But let’s expand that out to the “forest level” for the school—is it possible for a school like Notre Dame to ensure that all of its scholarship awards are higher for all its cross-admits with Michigan? Of course not! Notre Dame’s AdComms have no idea who among their applicants is also applying to any other school. And even if they did, the goals at Michigan and Notre Dame are apples to oranges. Let’s go back to the LSAT chart we showed earlier from the Current Volume Summaries report:

And now let’s provide links to Notre Dame and Michigan’s respective lawschooldata profiles for this year. It’s fairly clear that Michigan is targeting a 171 LSAT; Notre Dame’s profile doesn’t have as many data points, but it appears that they’re hoping to maintain their 169 median.

So now let’s put this all together:

  • Notre Dame is lower ranked—sure—but they’re also targeting a lower median LSAT.
  • In a world of medians, every student who is at or above the target helps in the same way. For Notre Dame’s purposes, a student with a 169, 170, or 171 helps them just as much to achieve a 169 median.
  • Per the national data, applicants in the 169/170 range are up 2%. Notre Dame likely isn’t taking anything for granted, but they probably feel comfortable achieving the same medians as last year.
  • Over in Michigan’s target range, applicants at a 171/172 are flat. Michigan also isn’t taking anything for granted, but they also know that they don’t have a lot of margin for error here.
  • As such, a theoretical student with a 171 LSAT is going to be more valuable to Michigan than Notre Dame. While Notre Dame would no doubt love to enroll that student, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for them to break the bank for that student’s scholarship by not only matching Michigan’s offer but to exceeding it. Why? Because Notre Dame could just offer a lower award to a student with a 169 or 170 and end up with the same statistical benefit to their enrolling class.

We encourage students not to take these situations personally or to question the sanity of the AdComms at the lower-ranked school. Save that anger and incredulity for other mysteries of life, like why McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken during Shamrock Shake season.

7Sage Events

And speaking of scholarships, we will be hosting a Live Marquee Class on Tuesday, February 27 at 8 PM Eastern. 7Sage Admissions Consultants Taj McCoy (formerly of Berkeley Law) and Sam Riley (formerly of Texas-Austin Law) will be discussing the ins and outs of named scholarship awards and negotiations/reconsiderations with Carla Anderson, the Director of Operations for Admissions and Financial Aid at Penn Carey Law. They will answer questions from the audience as time permits. Registration is required, so be sure to sign up here.