Law school admissions officers are currently navigating one of the oddest times of their professional calendar. On the one hand—most colleges and universities are closed for the holidays or have hours that are so reduced that the effect is the basically the same. On the other—the work continues to pile up. The applications aren’t going away while their offices are closed. So is a vacation really a vacation if one is more stressed out about what’s on the other side (“All those apps!”) rather than the things that one should be frazzled about at this time of year (“We need to return these gifts … but where did I put the receipts?!”)?
But on this note and given the paucity of news at this time of year, we’ll take a quicker-than-usual lap around the law school admissions world just so we can close the books on 2024 and begin 2025 on fresh footing.
National Application Trends
When we last checked in on national apps in our most recent blog post from two weeks ago, we noted that everything was remaining steady. National applications on December 11th were 33.5% higher than last year. By December 18th, that percentage had “changed” (with heavy sarcasm implied) to 33.1%. The same could be said about national applicants—they were up 25.4% on the 11th and that had “slipped” to 25.3% on the 18th. Two weeks onward, our check on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report is showing a great deal of consistency:
We’ll grant that slowing down 1% in applicants and 2% in applications is at least something to report … but it’s not a whole lot. Given that this is usually the time of year when we hit the 50% mark for total applications submitted for the entire admissions cycle, this just emphasizes that this application surge just isn’t going to go anywhere. And adding further fuel to the fire is the…
January LSAT
Just like the national applicant/application figures, registrations for the January LSAT aren’t budging much.
Our last check of LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report showed that 33,842 hearty souls were scheduled for the January LSAT. This week, we’re down 2.8% to 32,891 registrants:
While we’re still two weeks away from test day, we would have to start seeing a lot of cancellations and reschedules in order to drop the numbers for the January 2025 below those for the January 2024 edition. And as long as the January LSAT numbers remain strong, it just lends further credence to our belief that the national application figures aren’t going to drop off anytime soon—surely, there are plenty of people taking the January LSAT who are planning to submit applications once they’re done taking the LSAT.
And meanwhile, we should also note that we’ve passed the registration deadline for the February LSAT. The February LSAT is the time when we start seeing more “first time” test takers entering the mix. As such, it’s usually more of a bellwether for the upcoming admissions cycle rather than the current one. While registration numbers are quite high now, we wouldn’t be surprised if they drop a bit more than what we’ve seen for the November and January tests (in which registration figures remained very stable in the weeks leading up to the exam). The November and January tests are seen as “last ditch” attempts at the LSAT for many. That means that test takers are less likely to cancel and/or reschedule—they simply won’t have any more opportunities to take the LSAT for this admissions cycle. But our February test takers have a bit more opportunity to retake if they don’t feel quite prepared on test day.
So maybe this will finally be the LSAT where we end our yearlong hot streak of increased LSAT test takers … maybe….
Recent Decisions
As we noted in our December 11th and 18th posts, it’s not common for law schools to issue decisions over the holidays because the offices are closed, they’re operating with skeleton staffs with a majority of their employees taking vacation, and/or they simply can’t round up enough of their respective admissions committees to have a quorum for making decisions. We see this reflected on the “Recent Decisions” page of lawschooldata.org. Since December 24th, there have been a few decisions but they’ve been rather minimal. In fact, they’ve been so “minimal” that it’s possible that they’re not really happening now. Rather, it’s possible that lawschooldata users are just updating their profiles now with decisions and are listing December 28th or 29th as the “decision date” even though the decision came back a few weeks ago.
But we can also tell that a few schools were working right up until the bitter end, like our friends over in Ann Arbor who always issue admissions decisions on Wednesdays and didn’t miss the opportunity for one last round in 2024:
Ho, ho, ho, indeed! Here’s what we got when we asked an AI image generator to give us a wolverine wearing a Santa hat.
Seems about right!
And with this round of decisions, we’re continuing to see some schools clearly aiming for higher LSAT medians. For example, Emory Law’s profile is starting to show a green wall developing at a 166:
Keep this in mind in case you are still developing your application list or are considering adding another school or two to your list. It may be prudent to apply to a few more safety schools where your LSAT is at least two points over the school’s most recently published medians.
7Sage Events
Our weekly Zoom classes on different components of a law school application are taking one more week off before resuming on January 8th. Our next session will be on the financial aid process. You can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.
Our most recent episode of the admissions podcast dropped just before Christmas and gave a broader status check on the admissions process now that we’re at the holidays (as well as some advice on what to do at this time of year). Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!