With the middle of August here, a good number of colleges and universities are set to open for the academic year. This gives AdComms one of the final milestones in their work cycle—orientation. The new class is here! Hopefully even in one piece and with minimal last-minute drama! So let’s take a few minutes today to discuss what this date means for prospective applicants as well as our dedicated audience of readers who have stuck with us for this past season.
For prospective students, it may seem a bit odd to get interested or excited about orientation at schools that you haven’t even applied to yet. However, this is a key date because it’s the first time that schools may release some key information that will shape the coming admissions cycle—their class profile. These stats can change a little bit over time so let’s work backwards from when the class’s stats are official until we get to orientation.
The final word on a school’s stats for enrollment and employment are the documents published by the American Bar Association in December. In order to publish schools’ 509 reports—i.e., the reports that give admissions stats—in December, the ABA requires law schools to submit their enrollment information by October 5. That’s the “lock-in” date—a student who drops out before that date isn’t counted on the report; any student who drops out after the date has to be counted. The reason that schools aren’t required to report this information any earlier to the ABA is because of the various calendars used by semester- and quarter-based schools. A number of quarter-based schools don’t begin classes until September. The latest is the University of Chicago Law School’s—they don’t begin classes until September 26! As such, this pushes back everyone’s reporting time.
That brings us back to the present moment and orientation. Even though stats aren’t locked in for another month+, schools may start publishing and announcing their stats beginning now. Because while the stats aren’t “official” until the ABA lock-in date, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t benefit schools to start talking about how awesome their enrolling classes are. For entering students, returning students, faculty, administrators, and alums, trumpeting the strength of the incoming class is one way to talk about the school’s bright future. And for prospective students, this is a good advertisement and update regarding what will likely be the benchmark stats for this year’s applicant pool.
Schools will start publishing their profiles in a few ways on their websites. In the case of Michigan Law, you can easily find a link to their class profile via their main Admissions landing page. The profile itself is well designed and clearly articulates which class this is for (“Class of 2026”) while outlining the main stats that are relevant for prospective students, such as LSAT and GPA medians, class size, and demographics. For Cornell Law, you have to dig a little bit. You can go to their main admissions page and click on the “JD Class Profile” link … but that will take you to the entering class of 2022’s profile. To find the data for the entering class of 2023, you actually have to go to their main landing page, then click on “Facts and Statistics” at the bottom, THEN click on “More Facts and Statistics” in the “Facts & Statistics” section. OOF!
This is where we teach you one of the most obvious admissions hacks possible—just do a Google search for “[Law school name] class profile.” If you want to really be a pro, you can also add “class of 2026” or “entering class of 2023” to help narrow down your search. But also be sure that you actually use the law school’s name (e.g., “Emory Law”) rather than just the school’s name (“Emory”). Forgetting to add “law” in there will generate a search where the top hits are for the incoming undergrads. If you see SAT and ACT scores, try again because you’ve crashed the wrong party!
Some schools will keep a low profile (no pun intended) and may just make announcements at orientation about the entering class. So how do you find out those schools’ profiles? One is to keep an eye on the law school admissions sub-Reddit. Active posters from this past year may share data that their deans mention at orientation presentations. Take it with a grain of salt though until you see something official. For example, is it possible that UT Austin’s entering class is 11% smaller than last year’s? Sure, enrollment numbers can fluctuate a bit on an annual basis, and Michigan Law’s class is also 10% smaller this year. But is it possible that Notre Dame’s LSAT median is going up two points? Well, posters are saying that the dean said it at orientation and deans typically are pretty detail-oriented … but two points is a big jump for schools in the U.S. News top 30 … and their lawschooldata chart seems to indicate that they were shooting for a 169 .. so maybe don’t lose hope yet if you’re sitting on a 169 and want to go to South Bend for a few years.
Another way is to attend law fairs and other recruitment events like an in-person campus visit. We’ll cover this topic in greater detail in a few weeks! But for now, you can file this away:
- Most schools have printed brochures and pamphlets for distribution at these events that will provide detail on the most recent class profile.
- And lacking that, you can always take the old-school approach and just straight-up ask the admissions representative about things.
Once you have this information as a prospective applicant, you can then recalibrate what schools you should consider as safeties, targets, and reaches. To return to some previous examples, Michigan Law didn’t really move their stats for their incoming class—their class size went down by 10%, but their LSAT median stayed the same, and their GPA median increased by .02. That’s not much! Meanwhile, Cornell’s stats are so similar to last year’s that you have to triple-check to find the differences—their LSAT and GPA medians stayed the same, they enrolled two fewer students, and the only other change is that they increased their bottom 25th percentile GPA (which isn’t an important stat, but at least confirms that these stats are new!). So if you have a 3.90 GPA and 172 LSAT and are looking at Michigan and Cornell, your stats are still aligning with their medians. You can probably consider these as “target schools.” But let’s go back to that Reddit post about Notre Dame and change the hypothetical a smidge. If you have a 3.90 and a 169 LSAT, you could have considered ND a “strong” target if their medians were still at last year’s 3.81 and 168. But if ND has now moved to a 3.85 and 170? Perhaps you should consider them more a “weak” target because you’re just above their GPA median and just below their LSAT median.
So now that we’ve discussed how a school’s class profile at orientation can be a useful “check-in” for this year’s applicants, let’s take a look back at the students who are now wrapping up. What does a class profile mean for them? To put it simply—this is their crew. They are at the beginning of a journey in the legal profession. Once they enter law school, these first-year students are lawyers in training and are part of the broader legal community. They can join student organizations and activities that help real clients who are experiencing real legal problems. They also start making friends, colleagues, rivals, and frenemies for the next three years as well as the next fifty years. These are folks who will be your study group partners this semester, will be at your wedding in a few years, will help you network when you’re trying to make a lateral move to a new market ten years from now, and may testify on your behalf when you’re being nominated for a federal judicial seat twenty years down the line (because what is a blog if not an opportunity to dream the biggest dreams?). We at 7Sage wish you all the best as you begin this new chapter of your lives, make lots of great friends, and also—perhaps—a handful of folks who will rue the day they stole your favorite seat in the law library when they need your confirmation vote to get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in due time.