LSAC To Seek Cash From Grad Schools

Amid the declining number of law school applicants, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) recently raised fees in an effort to meet its annual expenses.

In a further quest to protect its bottom line for the years to come, LSAC is now seeking to provide application-related services to graduate schools.

Currently, its "credential assembly service" (CAS) gathers law school applicants' personal statements, recommendation letters, transcripts, etc. and digitally transmits them to law schools, eliminating the need for each law school to build such a system itself.

LSAC now wants to provide such services to schools other than law schools, since it already has the system in place. It may reach out to schools providing degrees such as the MBA and PhD.

(Medical schools already have AMCAS, but business and graduate schools lack a centralized application processing system. GMAC doesn't perform this service for business schools, and the GRE is produced by ETS, which isn't focused on graduate schools in particular.)

Will the Law School Admission Council change its name someday?

LSAC's president, Daniel Bernstine, hasn't yet addressed this question. However, he does explain the new venture in LSAC's latest newsletter for law schools in article titled, "Riding It Out and Reaching Out":

It’s no secret that we’ve been on an applicant-volume roller-coaster ride for the past few years. After years of steady increases toward a new volume record a couple of years ago, we’ve witnessed a steep and rapid decline from that peak. Reactions to this sudden drop have been roller-coaster-like as well: some have closed their eyes and held on tight, while others have thrown their hands in the air and screamed. 

It’s also no secret that LSAC’s revenues are closely tied to candidate volumes. Moreover, as we have steadily added and improved the services that we offer to candidates and law schools, our steady-state expense levels naturally have increased. Sudden volume drops therefore have an immediate impact on the organization’s bottom line. Although our budget for the 2012–2013 fiscal year is balanced, it seems that the time is ripe for LSAC to look at diversifying its revenue stream, so that sudden jolts in law school candidate volumes have less of an impact on our financial health. 

To that end, we have begun to explore expanding the client base for our Credential Assembly Service to other professional and graduate school disciplines. In looking around, we believe that the package of admission-process services we offer to law schools and candidates is unmatched in breadth, quality, and comprehensiveness. No other organization provides a standardized transcript analysis in the way that LSAC does through CAS. We believe that this feature alone should make CAS attractive to other programs, but it’s the complete package of services that we will be trying to market. 

The Board of Trustees has allocated seed money from LSAC’s reserves to launch this exploration, and progress is well underway. As we reach out to graduate programs, some of you may be contacted by your own university colleagues who are curious about CAS, ACES2, and LSAC itself. We hope you will have good things to say! 

Of course, LSAC remains an organization of law schools, governed by the law schools. This new effort is in no way designed to weaken our commitment to serving you. Indeed, if successful, it will have benefits to legal education by placing LSAC on a stronger, more diverse financial footing. Also, we believe that new clients will have their own ideas for improvements to our services, and those ideas naturally will improve the services we provide to law schools. We are very excited about this new initiative, and hope that it will lead us in future years to a steadier ride for all.

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