As the middle of March arrives and colleges across the country take their annual spring break, we hit one of the peak “salt on the wound” moments for admissions officers of all stripes—undergrad, law, or grad.
It’s not enough to see all the current students take a few days to go somewhere nice.
And all the faculty and student-facing staff members (like the career office, the registrar, and student services) taking a day or two to work at home isn’t the best but at least it’s understandable, and AdComms feel a certain esprit de corps with their fellow employees.
The real whammy is when a current student or applicant asks an admissions officer what they plan to do for spring break. The polite and professional answer is “Actually, spring break is just for the students.” The less polite answer is
Law school AdComms have entered one of their crunchiest of crunch times. Not only are there still applications to read (more about that below), but everyone is on the cusp of hosting their admitted student programs. No big deal—just the biggest recruitment events of the year and the ones that will have the greatest impact on the quality of the incoming class.
So as our AdComm friends channel their inner sources of zen to help them power through the next month, let’s do our weekly check-in on news and headlines from around the world of law admissions.
Decision Trends
Let’s start with the concluding theme of last week’s blog and give an update on some trends.
As we noted, we’re going to see some schools begin to hit their target numbers for admitted students in the coming weeks. How will we be able to tell this? Because school decision trends on the Recent Decisions page of lawschooldata.org will start transitioning from looking more like this
to something more like this
So what are we to take away from this moment? At the macro level, law schools are still admitting students at this juncture. Boston College, UChicago, and Penn are just a small sampling because they provided all their admissions decisions—admit, waitlist, and deny—on the same day so as to provide us with a delightful visual.
But we’re certainly seeing more micro trends of schools pivoting more towards denies and waitlists. To that end, Wash U is a good canary in the coal mine. Wash U historically focuses on admitted students through early March. We can see that pretty clearly in their lsd.law chart from last year that plots admissions decisions via LSAT and the date the student received their decision:
Few schools are as clear with their decision patterns!
Once that yellow and red wall hits, they’ll still admit a few applicants here and there, but their main waves of admit offers are done. Why? Because they’re confident that they’ve hit their numbers and the time has come to focus their energy less on evaluating applications and more on recruiting their admitted students.
We’ll see more of this in the coming weeks!
National Application Trends
And if that didn’t make our readers feel good enough, let’s check in on the national application numbers via LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report! Last week, both applicants and applications slowed down just a touch from the week prior. This week, we’re moving in the other direction:
Last week, applicants were up 20.3% and applications were up 23.3% versus the 2023–2024 admissions cycle. These variations are nothing inherently to write home about, but they’re interesting to see as we hit one of our last big application dates for the year. A number of schools have application deadlines on March 15th. As we’ve approached November 1, and Thanksgiving, and the holidays, and the January LSAT results coming back, we have noted that this may be the time when applications in the 2024–2025 pool finally slow down. The only big dates remaining are March 15th and April 1st. It’ll be interesting to see the news on this front when we write next week’s blog!
LSAT Registrations
Meanwhile, there’s no such big news on the horizon for LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report! The April LSAT is still a few weeks away and the registration deadline for the June LSAT isn’t until April 22nd. But it’s still worth checking in just to make sure that
yep, the April LSAT numbers are still strong!
Last week’s check showed 27,277 April registrations. That number has gone down 1.4% since then. That’s rather normal to see when test day is still a month away. It’s likely that we won’t see any big shifts until the week before test day.
Meanwhile, June registrations went up 13.5% this week. Even with the registration deadline a month away, things are shaping up for yet another big exam!
7Sage Events
We’re taking a brief break from our weekly admissions classes, but these will resume in a few weeks. A reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.
Our latest episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast dropped on Monday and featured a recording from our February Law School Deans’ Roundtable. The topics du jour were focused on all things financial aid, especially best practices for negotiating scholarships and/or asking for a scholarship reconsideration (and when it’s best to say “thanks!” and not press your luck). Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts! And speaking of the roundtable, our next one will be March 27th at 8 PM Eastern. Registration is required but free.