With dreams of turkey dinners and pumpkin pies swimming in their minds pre-Thanksgiving, law school admissions officers continue to spend their present time reading applications as quickly as possible in the hopes of being able to spend the holiday with their real family rather than their application family.

And for our purposes at 7Sage Admissions Blog HQ, we continue to monitor the headlines from the world of law school admissions before we take a few days off to make sure that the turkey is cooked properly, the gravy doesn’t burn, and that one particular relative gets cut off after one glass of wine. As such, we’ll take a break from the blog next week and will be back on December 8th with more headlines. While we know our readers will be disappointed by that turn of events, we also know that many of you will be focused on submitting your own law school applications because …

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National LSAT Numbers

The results of the November LSAT come back the day before Thanksgiving! Per LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report, we continue to expect a surge of apps in the coming days.

Historically, the November LSAT has served as the final “primary” LSAT for an admissions year.

Yes, lots of people will take the January test.

Yes, the majority of January LSAT test takers are doing so to help improve their chances of admission during the present application cycle.

The difference is that the January LSAT is more of a “last ditch” test because of when it occurs vis-à-vis various application deadlines. Once the January LSAT is done, we’re not too far away from some deadlines. January results will be released on the 28th of that month, and UCLA Law’s application deadline is just two days later on the 30th. A number of T14s will then follow suit with their own deadlines around February 15th.

And given the timing of the November LSAT score release with the Thanksgiving holiday, we wouldn’t be surprised if my prospective applicants use the four-day weekend to their advantage by submitting a number of apps.

But back to the January LSAT for a moment; we’re approaching its registration deadline on Black Friday—November 28th. With the past few LSATs, we’ve seen this year’s exams already surpass the previous year’s registration numbers by the time we’ve been a week away from the registration deadline. That hasn’t happened for January. Meanwhile, we usually see a surge of upwards of 30% in registrations in the week before a deadline. If you start doing the math

that means we may end up with around 27,000 registrations after the deadline. If so, then we’re all but guaranteed that the January 2026 LSAT will have fewer test takers than the January 2025 edition. In fact—to be bold for a moment—we think we’d have to be at about 32‒33,000 registrations post-deadline to feel confident that this January’s test will exceed last January’s test for numbers. While it’s possible we’ll hit those numbers, we’d put the odds at less than 50/50. So are we finally going to see a substantial break in our LSAT surge? Our magic eight ball says

Fingers crossed!

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Current Volume Summaries Report

And—look!—the crossed fingers are already working! Per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report, national apps continue to slow down a smidge every week:

We were at +20.8% in applications last week, so here’s to our continued minor graces!

But given the aforementioned Thanksgiving holiday and November LSAT, our first post-December 1st check-in will be a big one. If we don’t see a surge of applicants, there’s a chance that the final numbers for this year may be more in the range of +5‒8% in national apps when the dust finally settles in April.

You can find one particularly interesting note for this week’s numbers in the “Applicants” section. The one group that is not vastly exceeding the pace this year is those applicants located in the “Other” region.

Before spending too much time looking at maps trying to figure out where “Other” is in the United States

please understand that this is a trick question. The “Other” category represents those applicants applying from outside the U.S.

Why is that group flat versus last year?

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This Week in The Shifting Landscape of Higher Education

Well, let’s return to our semi-regular series on the goings-on in higher education!

Enough time has passed since orientation for colleges to start publishing enrollment information for the 2025‒2026 academic year. The results for international students are not surprising—new student enrollment at American colleges among foreign nationals was down 17% versus last year. There are likely two forces at play:

1. As chronicled in our last series entry back in October, the Trump administration has made it a priority to encourage American colleges and universities to limit the enrollment of foreign nationals. Many schools likely read the tea leaves of our political moment and may have reduced the offers of admission that they extended to international students this past spring. But given that the admissions cycle was already underway by the time that the 2024 election occurred and was more than halfway over by the time President Trump was inaugurated in January, the more likely option is …
2. Foreign nationals are taking a look at the present state of affairs in the United States and are saying

The ramifications of this decline in international enrollment shouldn’t hit law schools directly in any significant way. Frankly, international applicants have neither applied to nor enrolled in American law schools in numbers significant enough to sway things radically—it’s usually about 4‒5% of the applicant pool.

But there may be some indirect effects on law schools. Lower international enrollment at a university means lower tuition revenue for the school (since many international students pay more in tuition than domestic students). A downturn in tuition revenue may require all branches of a university to tighten their belts a bit more. For law schools, we would see this reflected in things like lower scholarship offers for this year’s admitted students.

We’ll keep an eye on this as the admissions cycle continues!

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National Decision Trends

And speaking of the cycle, more and more schools are getting in on the Admit Wave action on lawschooldata.org’s “Recent Decisions” page:

Surf’s up!

We may see some more big waves of decisions pre-Thanksgiving, but don’t be surprised if admissions offices take a break given the shortened work week.

In last week’s blog entry, we tried to suss out some of the initial waves to sense what schools may be targeting for this year’s medians. One point we made is that you may not be able to tell immediately what a school is doing. It’s possible that you’ll have to let things develop. For instance, last week, it seemed like both Georgetown and Michigan Law’s respective lawschooldata.org admit charts were showing an initial target of a 174 LSAT. Even with just one more week of data, we can see some hope for Michigan Law applicants:

While we could kinda/sorta/maybe make out a line at a 174 last week, the line this week seems to be more at a 173. We also see a few admits with low GPAs and 172s or a 171 LSAT. Given their median of a 171 for this year’s 1L class, this is a bit more of a reasonable target.

So while it’s important to track data, do remember that it’s still early in the admissions year. No doubt we’ll have a few more twists and turns before it’s all done in the summer of 2026!

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7Sage Events

Our next Admissions AMA will be on November 26th. Stop on by and ask whatever law school admissions questions are on your mind!

With the November LSAT scores coming back, we’ll also have the next “What Does My Score Mean?” class on November 24th. Come on by to learn how the LSAT fits within the larger framework of your application!

Our most recent podcast dropped on Monday and features a conversation about the myth, the legend, the reality (perhaps…?) of yield protection in the admissions process. Be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!

Thanks for reading! You can learn more about 7Sage Admissions Consulting’s services here, and if you’d like help deciding which service is right for you, you can book a free consultation here.