What’s Going On in the Admissions Cycle Right Now?
As April showers continue to bring the promise of May flowers, admissions officers are reading late-arriving applications, processing decisions, hosting admitted students for one more program, and staring at their deposit form like an old-school Wall Street stock trader so as to follow the up-to-the-second fluctuations in their incoming classes. We’ll go more into that deposit form process next week given the approach of April 15, but we wanted to give a little time this week to a series of related questions we receive quite often from our students—why do most law schools schedule their admitted student visits for the same day? It seems like all the open houses are on the same Fridays. Why don’t they do more programming on the weekends? Don’t admissions officers get it that almost all their applicants are either working or are current students, so a weekday visit is tough? It may seem pedantic, but thinking this over can probably give students a bit more insight into how law schools operate.
Let’s start with the basics—what are the big factors that affect when a school’s visit programs are scheduled?
First and most obvious is the deposit deadline. As mentioned in previous newsletters, most schools have deadlines of either April 1, April 15, or April 30/May1. Clearly, schools want to have their visit programs before that date.
But then you have to worry about holidays. What’s “fun” (with all the sarcasm that those quotation marks convey) about scheduling recruitment events for March and April is that the main holidays at this time of year are based on lunar calendars. They are moving targets. So one of the first things that admissions officers have to do when scheduling their recruitment calendar is to do a Google search for the dates of Passover and Easter. Even if a school is public and has no religious affiliation, they likely want to avoid hosting big recruitment events then since admitted students may be spending time with their families and faculty/staff could be busy.
Speaking of those pesky faculty and staff, another curveball is spring breaks. Notice the plural there. It’s not just the law school’s spring break; we also mean the local school systems’ spring break. Did you know that faculty/staff sometimes have families with small children? And that those children have a break that doesn’t align in any way at all with when a college’s spring break happens? It’s true! This is one of a million small psychological cuts that parents have to endure (e.g., “I can’t go anywhere during my law school’s spring break because the kids are still in school … and I can’t go anywhere for my kid’s spring break because my law school is open…”). While it’s rare for faculty/staff to take off for an entire week of vacation towards the end of a semester, it’s fairly common for them to take a three- or four-day weekend to go do something with their family.
And finally there are weather considerations. For schools located in snowy climates, hosting any big visit program prior to March 1 wouldn’t be prudent. It’s not super welcoming to roll out the red carpet onto a few inches of freshly deposited “wintery mix.”
Once you bring this all together, you basically have an LSAT Logic Game question. For this year, the question would be presented like this:
- Whereby your deposit deadline is April 15, and
- Your law school’s spring break is the week of March 13, and
- The local school system’s spring break is the week of April 3, and
- Passover and Easter are the week/weekend of April 5-9, and
- There’s a strong possibility of snow through February.
Question: When do you schedule your big open houses?
Answer: March 24 and March 31, maybe March 3 if you’re willing to tempt the fate of the Snow Gods.
“But wait!” you may be saying. “You’re assuming that these events must happen on a Friday and that’s a logical fallacy! Schools could just do them on Saturdays!”
Au contraire.
From the school’s perspective, the purpose of a visit program is so that admitted students can see what the law school is like and if it’s the right place for them. They want to show you what the law school looks like when it’s in action. You can’t really do that on a weekend because faculty, staff, and students won’t be there. Class observation? Nope. Lunch with faculty? Dude—if we need to beg them to attend a free lunch on a Friday, there’s no way they’re coming to one on a Saturday. Info session with career services? Tour of the law school? The list goes on and on.
There are some schools that do programs on Saturdays but they tend to be very stripped down affairs—perhaps an information session with admissions, a student-led tour, and maybe one prof to talk with. This can be alright as an accoutrement to your menu of visit options, but it really can’t be the main course. If AdComms need to hold big events to recruit a lot of students, and if the events require a critical mass of current students, faculty, and staff, then you have to do them on a weekday.
In the end, this also probably gives you a sense of how law schools are a bit different from undergrad schools. Law schools are so much smaller. Even the biggest law schools—Harvard, Georgetown, NYU, etc.—enroll classes of 500-ish students. That’s fewer students than the senior class at my local high school. It’s far smaller than the incoming freshman class at the nearby colleges and universities. And because law school classes are smaller, the law school staffing is also smaller. For recruitment programs, the staff is limited enough that AdComms know which profs have kids and will be out on spring break. They know which ones tend to be fussy about the lunch menu. And they know which ones need to be reminded—constantly!—about the big open house on Friday. There’s minimal slack on a weekday so that means that weekend recruitment programs are just a non-starter. But there’s a benefit, too. Smaller classes mean that you get to know everyone. You will also learn about professors’ kids, the faculty who are fussy about lunch (because there will be lunches with your faculty), and which ones tend to be a bit spacey about showing up on time to meetings. Most colleges are too big to really develop those kinds of meaningful relationships with the professional side of the institution. But law schools? They’re like a little town and you’re the new neighbor who just moved in. So while you’re shaking your fist, cursing every law school for having an open house on the same day, and wondering where you can obtain your very own Time-Turner so you can be in more than one place at the same “time,” remember that this will be to your benefit in the end! You just have to get to Orientation!