Will Law Schools' Scramble for Applicants / Rankings Turn Even Uglier?

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

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To what new lows will law schools have to sink in order to attract top-scoring applicants?

While the Law School Admission Council's newest numbers indicate that law school applicant numbers are in steep decline, they also indicate that the declines are not equal across the board.

In particular, we're seeing a huge drop-off in top LSAT scorers applying this cycle. The decline in the number of law school applicants has come disproportionately from the top end of the spectrum.

The number of applicants whose highest LSAT scores were 170-174 (97th-99th percentiles) declined by 20.7%, while the number of applicants whose highest scores were 140-144 (13th-23rd percentiles) and below 140 dropped by only 6.2% and 4.3%, respectively. The number of applicants with other LSAT scores generally decreased anywhere from approximately 14%-19%.

(These figures are based on data submitted through 3/30/12. LSAC states, "Last year at this time, we had 91% of the preliminary final applicant count.")

Here's the full set of LSAT numbers from LSAC:

In other words, a bunch of top LSAT scorers decided not to even bother applying, while all but a tiny fraction of those with the lowest LSAT scores are still applying. (See The Atlantic's take on this.)

(Pardon my tone, low-scoring applicants, but what the hell are you people doing? If your highest LSAT score on an official test administration is 144, or less, you need to seriously rethink your LSAT study habits or consider another profession. I don't care if your GPA's a 4.3 from Grade Inflation University, but you're not getting into any law school worth considering with that LSAT score.)


Here's a chart with the number of law school applicants over past 10 years:

Law schools, I hope you took notes at The Hunger Games because things are about to get real ugly. You'll have to scramble to acquire top scorers or risk dying a slow death in the U.S. News rankings. (Or, even worse, lose tuition dollars and make cutbacks. A far cry from the expansions of only a few years ago.)  No more email screw-ups a la Baylor Law. No more fudging your employment numbers. It doesn't matter whether you win the resulting lawsuits or not - the publicity surrounding the lawsuits isn't doing you any good when it comes to attracting applicants.

I'll be impressed if you manage to keep your LSAT medians stable, given the rapidly shrinking pool of top-scoring applicants. You've got a major catch-22 on your hands. You can either:

1. Accept the same number of applicants as last year in order to get the tuition dollars necessary to keep operations running smoothly, and lower LSAT medians (risking a drop in the U.S. News rankings), or

2. Accept fewer applicants to minimize the effect on LSAT medians and U.S. News rankings, but lose tuition dollars and make cutbacks.

There are no easy answers here, but at least you'll be in good company - with the exception of the top 14,  pretty much every law school's in the same boat.


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