In their last full week in the office before the holidays throw a wrench into the ensuing fortnight, law school admissions officers are rushing to get their final bursts of work in before the New Year. For some schools, it’s issuing their first wave of decisions (as we discussed in last week’s blog). For others, it may be rounding up their admissions committee for one last review before everyone goes their separate ways for the holidays. And for others, it may just be the continued slow review of files (e.g., those schools like Harvard and Chicago that will issue their first decisions after January 1). But after a potential flurry of decisions in the coming days, the upcoming three weeks will likely be pretty quiet:

  • There may be a few schools that issue decisions on Monday the 23rd. You can expect all admissions offices to be closed for Christmas Eve and Christmas.
  • The same applies for the following week. There may be some decisions issued on either December 30th or on January 2nd or 3rd, but it will depend on whether anyone was reading applications at the school in the week ahead of time.
  • Which then brings us to why the week of January 6th will also be a bit dead—while AdComms are back in the office, they can’t issue any decisions if their staff hasn’t been reading applications for two weeks.

So let’s buckle up for an exciting few days and check in on the news and headlines from around the world of law school admission.

National Application Trends

This will likely be our quickest check of the year!

Per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report, here were the national Applicant and Application totals we reported in last week’s blog:

And here’s this week’s total:

At least we’re holding steady!

(And apologies for the poor screen grab! LSAC's archive is acting wonky this week!)

The next few weeks are typically among the busiest for submitting applications. This happens for the pretty simple reason that a sizeable percentage of law school applicants are current college students who are between semesters/quarters. So if we emerge from the holidays and are still seeing a sizeable percentage increase in applicants and applications, it’s likely that we’re going to hold those numbers through the rest of the admissions cycle. Especially since….

January LSAT

Registration numbers for the January LSAT remain strong. Last week’s check of the LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report showed 34,493 registrants for the upcoming test. This week, we’re at:

33,842—a decline of 1.8%. Much like our assessment of the national applicant pool, this is the definition of “holding steady.”

Expect the January LSAT takers to help boost application numbers a bit more as the calendar moves into mid-January. If a January LSAT taker has already applied to some schools, chances are that they’ll send out a few more after they get their updated score. And there are others who have been waiting to submit any apps until they’ve taken the January LSAT.

Meanwhile, we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that the registration deadline for the February LSAT is now a week away on Christmas Eve. That exam won’t have much of an effect on this year’s applicant pool because the majority of February LSAT test takers are first timers. And if you’re taking your first LSAT in February, it’s—hopefully!—not to apply to schools whose deadlines will have already passed on February 1 or February 15 or will be quickly approaching on March 1. As such, this will give us our first insight into the applicant pool for next year. We’re sure you can feel the excitement already!

ABA Reports Are Live

And speaking of excitement—the ABA 509 Reports were just published! Yay!

The American Bar Association requires schools that wish to be accredited by their august organization (i.e., everyone!) to abide by certain standards that are publicly published. Although some of our readers may be very curious to peruse Chapter 6 of the ABA’s Standards to learn more about requirements for library and information resources, or maybe consider how ABA Standard 403 ensures that the vast majority of law school courses are taught by full-time faculty rather than adjuncts (especially if any of your undergrad experiences mostly involved courses taught by grad students…), what we’re talking about is ABA Standard 509, which requires law schools to each publish certain standard admissions, enrollment, and financial aid information every year. In the law school world, we refer to these as 509 Reports.

While every law school is required to publicly post these standard reports on their respective websites, the easiest place to find this information is on the ABA’s website. This presents prospective students with one-stop shopping for all their statistical needs!

Before diving into the reports themselves, we want to acknowledge a few things:

  • Some of our readers may wonder what’s so exciting about this information, especially since most schools publish some form of a class profile shortly after the first-year orientation. As an example, here’s Harvard Law’s profile that they published back in August. First of all, not everyone does—Stanford Law famously does not publish anything akin to a class profile. This is as close as they get … and it’s for last year’s enrolling class. And there’s a great deal of variety in how schools present their data. For example, the University of Texas-Austin publishes quartiles instead of medians in their online profile. But everyone’s 509 Reports have the same information in all the same places of each report. It’s the true apples-to-apples comparison.
  • To provide some manner of standardization since schools have different start dates, the ABA requires schools to report their enrollment information based on their data as of October 5th of each year. In practical terms, it’s not uncommon for an enrolling student or two to have a last-minute change of mind and to drop out. Thus, some schools wait until after this “freeze date” to publish their class profiles. Duke Law is an example of this—note how this page mentions that the information is based on final data submitted to the ABA in October 2024.

With these reports in hand, we can have direct and complete information on a lot of things that are germane to prospective applicants:

  • Enrolling class size
  • GPA and LSAT medians
  • GRE-only enrollees
  • “Non-traditional” enrollees (i.e., Harvard’s JDP)
  • Average scholarship awards
  • Demographics for each class by gender and race (more on that in a moment…)
  • Transfer students coming in, and students transferring out to other schools

One reason this year’s edition of the 509 Reports was so anticipated is because of the demographic information. This is the first glimpse we’re getting into whether or not the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decisions in June 2023 had any ramifications on enrollment trends. LSAC has already issued a report to say that diversity enrollment is still strong … but we wonder if more research is needed because there are a few unique moving pieces to this year’s reports.

One big change affected how schools report foreign nationals. To this point, any student who was not a citizen or permanent resident of the United States was put into their own category—“US nonresident.” A foreign national’s race didn’t get recorded—they were all lumped into the same category. Starting this year, foreign nationals have been categorized by their racial identity.

To illustrate how this can lead to some wonky comparisons across years, here’s Washington University in St. Louis’s ABA Report from 2023 showing their demographics for their first-year class:

As a brief note, the columns represent Total, Men, Women, Additional Gender Identity, and Prefer Not to Reveal. The number we’re focused on for the moment is that Total column.

And now here’s the same table from 2024 for this year’s 1L class but with the foreign nationals now assigned into racial categories:

WashU Law’s enrollment of Hispanic and Black students remained stable, as did their enrollment of students who identify as being of two or more races. But their Asian enrollment appears to have skyrocketed from 21 1Ls last year to 74 this year. What’s likely happening is the “reallocation” of WashU’s foreign national students. In 2023, WashU enrolled 38 foreign nationals in the first-year class. The most common countries of origin for foreign nationals attending JD programs tend to be China and South Korea. If we assume that was the case for WashU’s 2023 enrolling foreign nationals, the picture becomes much clearer—21 Asian American students + 38 foreign nationals = 59 likely students of Asian ancestry. That’s not too far off of this year’s 74 number.

We’re seeing that same phenomenon at a few other schools that traditionally enroll a lot of foreign nationals. For example, here’s Columbia Law’s table from 2023:

And now from 2024:

Hispanic enrollment is down a touch, African American enrollment by just a few, and Asian American numbers appear to have zoomed into the stratosphere … but not really if you add Columbia’s 77 foreign nationals in 2023 in with their Asian American population.

But since these reports were only just published this past Monday, expect more of a detailed analysis in the weeks and months to come!

And for our audience who read all of that with their mouth agape because they swore that the SFFA decision meant that schools wouldn’t know a student’s race/ethnicity when applying—yes and no. Correct, schools can no longer see the race/ethnicity that a student selects on their application while reviewing the student’s application. However, schools can see that after the student has been admitted. Why? For this very reason—because they’re required by the ABA to report these statistics.

7Sage Events

Ooof! That’s enough stats for this week!

We are continuing our weekly Zoom classes on different components of a law school application. This Wednesday’s session will focus on Application Forms. Registration is free but required. You can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

Additionally, we’re trying something new this week! We’ll be hosting an AMA on the law school admissions sub-Reddit from 10 AM to 12 PM Eastern on Friday … followed by another live class from 12 to 1 PM Eastern that’s meant to serve as a status check on where we’re at in the admissions process. So if you like your advice in gif form—we’ll see you on Reddit! If you like it in Zoom form—see you in the live class!

Our next episode of the admissions podcast will be posted this coming Monday and will also give a broader status check on the admissions process as we approach the holidays. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!