What’s Going On in the Admissions Cycle Right Now?
As the academic year comes to a close, AdComms are solidly in the Tom Petty Zone with their incoming classes.
Admissions offices are caught in limbo while waiting for a few key events to happen.
First—and speaking of final exams—AdComms are waiting to receive final transcripts from their incoming students who are graduating from college. At most schools, it’s not odd for this population to exceed 50% of the 1L class. That represents a potential source of chaos regarding a school’s GPA median. Let’s say we’re back at the Random State University Law Center (Go Fightin’ Randos!). RSULC may have 200 deposited students and is hoping for an enrolling class of 210. They know that they need to admit students from the waitlist. Let’s say that they’ve hit their GPA target but they’re a little low on their LSAT. That would seem to indicate that they should primarily focus their waitlist activity on high-LSAT students. But what if all the students at their GPA median are graduating seniors? Their GPAs aren’t locked in yet. If they all caught Senioritis during their final semester, that could drag RSULC’s GPA down. It would be prudent for the AdComms to keep an eye on that stat while admitting those high-LSAT students from the waitlist and to strongly encourage their deposited students to be sure to submit their final transcripts (showing degree granted and date conferred—let’s be sure that everything is officially official!) as soon as those documents are available.
And speaking of waitlist activity, admissions officers are waiting for melt to happen. “Melt” is an admissions term that refers to losing deposited students between your deposit deadline and orientation. Since you lose those students over the spring and summer as the temperature rises, one can think of the students as “melting away.” The majority of melt happens between a school’s first and second deposit deadlines. The most popular dates for first deposit deadlines are April 1, April 15, and April 30/May 1; for the second deposit deadline, those dates are June 1 and June 15. During that period, schools tend to lose students for a few main reasons: because of waitlist activity elsewhere, or because of initial admission activity elsewhere (i.e., that school that’s being slow issuing decisions finally made an offer of admission in May to a student who applied in November and hadn’t heard anything in the meantime), and if a student had been double-deposited the entire time and finally chose to attend the other institution. But there also can be melt due to family or personal circumstances—perhaps a student’s family situation has changed or maybe a new matter has arisen that has led the student to request a deferral in their enrollment. Speaking from my own professional experience, I twice lost deposited students because they won their state’s competition for Miss America. Weird stuff can happen!
Melt is a constant presence for AdComms, almost like a force of nature. And much like storms, AdComms can know the conditions when it generally happens, but it can be hard to accurately predict how things will break for a particular year. For example, a lot of the initial chatter regarding T14 waitlist activity on the Law School Admissions sub-Reddit appears to be focused on students with high GPAs. In the recent past, it was more usual for schools to focus their initial waitlist activity on high-LSAT students. This is important for schools that are “downstream” of the T14.
Let’s go back to RSULC’s admissions office for a moment. They have those 200 deposits and are trying to boost their LSAT by admitting students from their waitlist to get to 210 deposits. They have data from past years that shows that the majority of their melt tends to occur in May as the schools ranked above them go to their waitlists. This data also shows that the melt tends to be concentrated on high-LSAT students. As such, they may conclude that they will have to admit a lot of high-LSAT students to hit their targets—some students to increase their enrollment, some just to replace the students that they’re confident they are about to lose. The RSULC admissions staff is confident that they’re about to go for a run on the Admissions Hamster Wheel of Doom. But little do they know that the T14 is focusing instead on high-GPA students. This may actually help RSULC out—every high-GPA/low-LSAT splitter they melt to the T14, that gets them one step closer to hitting their LSAT targets.
Finally, admissions officers are waiting to wrap up this admissions cycle and start planning in full for the next one. It can be challenging to make strategic plans for the future if the dust hasn’t fully settled in the present. There are some tasks that the admissions staff can start checking off now—running preliminary stats on this past year, beginning to update applications and publications, planning the dates for next year’s admitted student open houses, etc. They are also evaluating the new U.S. News rankings formula and having initial conversations about what—if anything—they should do to adjust for that factor in the coming cycle. But there’s only so much AdComms can do until the second deposit deadline passes and their enrolling classes come into better focus.
So what can you do about this as an applicant? Well, if you’re solidly deposited at a school and know your plans for the upcoming year, you can extend a measure of sympathy to your fellow human beings in the admissions office—it’s good to generate positive karma for the universe. If you’re still on the waitlist for various schools and you sent in a LOCI a few weeks ago, now could be a good time for a check-in message. It doesn’t have to be as elaborate as the LOCI (and if your reaction to reading this is “…what if I didn’t send in a LOCI…?”, you can read up on those documents in our admissions course here). Rather, this is just a brief message to update the admissions office that you remain highly interested in attending. If you are one of those graduating seniors and you have your final grades, you can inform the AdComms of those marks and that you are sending an updated official transcript to LSAC in the near future. Then go back to making plans for the upcoming year at the school where you are presently deposited and join your admissions brethren as everyone waits for shoes to drop, dust to settle, and the chickens to come home to roost.