With the middle of February here, admissions officers will take the quickest of breaks to open Valentine’s Day cards, have a chocolate or two, and then get back to reading applications. Those piles of documents (both actual paper and virtual) wait for no heart-shaped treats—they must be attended to! So it’s probably best to take guidance from Cookie Monster and opt for speed rather than cleanliness while consuming holiday sweets
and then get back to the reading process.
While our friends in law school admissions do their best to balance their spiked blood sugar with their professional obligations, let’s take our weekly check on the headlines from the world of law school admissions.
National Application Trends
In last week’s blog post, we noted something shocking! For the first time in forever (or at least since the beginning of the 2023–2024 application cycle), applications slowed down drastically in a week. They went from this on January 28th
to this on February 4th
We consulted various trusted sources (i.e., our calendars) and concluded that this was likely an aberration. The results of the January 2024 LSAT came back on January 31st, 2024, while the January 2024 LSATs results came back on February 5th this year. That five-day gap isn’t a lot, but it’s enough to throw anyone’s day-to-day comparisons off a bit.
Checking on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report this week shows that things have bounced back a bit but not all the way to pre-January LSAT levels:
It’s an increase over last week, no doubt about it. But if we want to get back to being +28% in applications versus last year (which no one is actually wanting, but we digress), we would need folks to submit an additional 14,000 applications.
Maybe that gap in apps will be made up in the coming days as we approach February 15th (a common app deadline for the T14) and March 1st (a common app deadline for the T30).
Or maybe applicants are just tapped out. As of today, the average applicant has applied to 7.14 schools; last year, that stat was 6.96. It’s possible that a number of January LSAT test takers received their scores, looked at their application list, pondered their futures, and, to quote the great Roberto Duran, said, “No mas.”
But even though the January LSAT didn’t provide an additional boost to the applicant pool that equaled the heft of its registration numbers (because recall that the January LSAT was one of the largest LSATs of the past seven years), it certainly didn’t do the opposite and act as an emergency brake for the national applicant pool. It’s the middle of February and apps are still up by 23.5% versus last year. If we look a smidge further down in the Current Volume Summaries report, we see that an even 100 law schools are presently up between 20 and 39% in applications versus last year:
No matter how you look at it, this will be an admissions cycle that applicants and law school admissions officers commiserate about for some time.
LSAT Registrations
But enough about this year! Let’s poke our noses into next year for a moment.
The February LSAT came and went last week so the registration numbers are final on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report. And the results are….
not as bad as they could have been!
On LSAT Eve, registrations were in the mid-14,000s. While a raw number drop of about 1,600 registrations before an LSAT is pretty normal, the percentage drop of 11% is rather high. But consider the population of February LSAT takers. This is when we start to see an increased percentage of first-time test takers. For them, this would have been their first crack at the LSAT. And since it would have been their first crack, it is not odd that a solid percentage—let’s say 11%—may have decided at the last minute to kick the can a little further down the road.
But the February 2025 numbers still represent an increase over the 2024 edition by about 22%. This extends our “hot streak” of LSATs—every iteration since October 2024 has seen increased numbers from the same test in the previous year. Next up—April! We’re still two weeks away from the registration deadline but are closing in fast on last year’s numbers.
7Sage Events
We’re taking a brief break from our weekly admissions classes, but these will resume in March or April. But a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.
Our next Law School Admissions Deans’ Roundtable will be February 25th at 8 PM Eastern. The topics du jour will include burning issues when you’re considering admit offers at this time of year—how to get the most out of your campus visits and how to make scholarship reconsideration requests.
Our latest episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast will drop this Monday and will include a conversation with Kamil Brown—7Sage admissions consultant and Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at Boston College Law—on the things that future applicants should know as they’re starting to get geared up for the upcoming admissions cycle. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!
Next Week’s Blog … Coming In Two Weeks
And given the slowness of the news at this time of year (“Oh, hey, applications are still up … and admissions officers are still reading applications….”), it’s a good time for our writing crew to take a long weekend for some travels. We’ll be back with our next post on February 26th!