How *Much* Easier to Gain Admission to Top-14 Law Schools?

I've talked a lot recently about the fact that law schools will have to lower their admission standards and reduce class sizes.

This is due to the shrinking applicant pool and the fact that the largest percentage decrease within that applicant pool comes from applicants scoring in the 170-174 range.

The graph to the top-right displays the projected number of law school applicants by LSAT score for the admission cycle ending in 2012, compared to applicants in the previous cycle (specifically for those scoring 165+).

A graph at the end of this post shows the projected number of applicants whose highest LSAT scores are below 165.

All numbers in this graph are based on this LSAC data, as well as LSAC's National Decision Profiles for 2010 (PDF) and 2011 (PDF). (Note: Thank you to blog reader Kevin for his advice in the compilation and projection of this data.)

In particular, here's the full set of numbers from LSAC's Current Volume Summary:

(LSAC notes that it had 91% of the preliminary applicant count at this time last year.)

The decline in top-scoring applicants presents a serious problem for top-14 law schools, which already have a limited pool of 170+-scorers from which they'd ideally like to draw the vast majority of their students.

In the 2010-2011 admission cycle (the Class of 2014), top-14 law schools competed over 4,052 170+-scoring applicants.

For the cycle finishing now (the Class of 2015), we can project that top-14 schools have only ~3,268 170+-scoring applicants to woo. If this drop of ~784 applicants (-19.4%) were spread evenly across the top 14 schools, each school would suffer a loss of ~56 applicants.

That's no small loss when class sizes at the top-14 law schools average only ~321 (data below).

Assuming that that the top-14 law schools aren't aiming to significantly reduce their class sizes for the Class of 2015, there just won't be enough 170+-scorers to go around.

(The following numbers are derived from data on schools' websites for the Classes of 2014 - with the exception of Stanford and Georgetown, whose websites only features the number for the Class of 2013, as well as Cornell. Its website simply lists a range of 198-205.)

Recent Class Sizes at the Top-14 Law Schools

1. Yale: ~205
2. Stanford: ~180
3. Harvard: ~559
4. Columbia: ~406
5. Chicago: ~191
6. NYU: ~450
7. Berkeley: ~254
7. Penn: ~266
7. UVA: ~357
10. Michigan: ~359
11. Duke: ~211
12. Northwestern: ~264
13. Georgetown: ~592
14. Cornell: ~203


Adding up these numbers, I arrive at the total of 4,497 as a general estimate of the top-14's law school enrollment (and enrollment goals) for the Class of 2014.

Above, I stated that the number of 170+-scoring applicants in the previous cycle was ~4,052. As such, the top-14 law schools could have all enrolled classes that consisted almost entirely of 170+-scorers (unlikely that they'd attempt to do so, but possible).

In this cycle, with only ~3,268 170+-scoring applicants, the top-14 law schools will face a serious gap between their previous enrollment goal of ~4,497 and their goal of keeping the LSAT scores of admitted (and enrolled) students as high as possible.

They'll have no choice but to dip into far into the pool of applicants with scores ranging from 165-169 (a pool that, itself, has shrunk from ~7,617 to ~7,138.)


Note #1: Of course, some applicants, even those with top LSAT scores, may ultimately choose not to attend law school at all, diminishing the pool of potential matriculants even further.

Note: #2: I have't even considered GPA numbers. Many applicants with high LSAT scores have low GPAs (they're known informally as splitters). Their low GPAs may render them undesirable to some law schools, providing schools with yet-another reason to accept applicants with lower LSAT scores.

Note #3: How reliable are the projections for the number of 165+-scoring applicants? I looked at the number of applicants for whom LSAC had data by 3/30 this year, and compared it to last year's number, as well as final applicant numbers from last cycle.

I found that LSAC had the following % of the preliminary applicant count by 3/30 last year:

97.5% of applicants with highest LSAT scores of 165-169.
98.7% of applicants with highest LSAT scores of 170-174.
99.3% of applicants with highest LSAT scores of 175-180.

(In other words, LSAC would've counted that % of applicants as being part of the application cycle by 3/30. As such, projections for the applicant count of 165+ scorers in this cycle can be assumed to be fairly close to the final numbers.)

Here's a graph with the data from which I derived these percentages:

Note #4: I've included below a graph containing projections of the specific numbers of law school applicants with LSAT scores below 165 in this cycle (and the previous cycle) for those interested in playing with the numbers. However, this data is less reliable: a significantly lower percentage of applicants with scores below 165 applied by this time last cycle. As such, numbers in these projections cannot be assumed to be nearly as precise as those for 165+ scorers.

Should you choose to analyze them anyway, please share your thoughts in the comments or via email.

***

For further reading, see my series of posts on recent trends in law school admissions.