Paul L. Caron
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Monday, October 21, 2024

15% Through The Fall 2025 Law School Admissions Season: Applicants Are Up 25% (Black Applicants Are Up 45%)

LSAC, It’s Early Days, but the 2025 Application Cycle Is Off to a Robust Start:

Every year by mid-October, LSAC begins publishing our interactive website for the current law school admission cycle. The website provides detailed information on the overall number of applicants and applications, and can be filtered and analyzed by geographic region, race/ethnicity, gender, LSAT score band, first-generation college status, and other criteria. ...

In looking at this year’s data, in particular the comparison with the prior year, it is important to recognize that last year’s admission cycle started slower than usual, in large part because a number of schools opened their applications later in order to review and update their admission processes and materials in response to the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on college admissions.

Last year’s slow start means that year-to-year comparisons at this early stage may overstate the growth in applicants. Last year’s cycle recovered pretty quickly once all schools had opened their applications, so we would expect to see more representative year-over-year data in a month or so. 

Even with those caveats about the year-to-year comparability of the early applicant numbers, we see multiple signs that this year’s admission cycle is starting off on a very robust path.

We are now 15% of the way through Fall 2025 law school admissions season. The number of law school applicants reported by LSAC is up 25% compared to last year at this time:

LSAC 1-1

176 of the 194 law schools are experiencing an increase in applications. Applications are up +40% or more at 72 law schools:

LSAC 1-2

Applicants are up in every region, and are up the most in Far West (+34.3%), Northeast (+34.1%), and Great Lakes (+27.7%):

LSAC 1-3

Applicants' LSAT scores are up +35.8% in the 170-180 band, +26.6% in the 160-169 band, +16.9% in the 150-159 band, and +13.1% in the 120-149 band:

LSAC 1-4

Black|African American applicants are up 44.6%; Asian applicants are up 36.7%; Not Indicated are up +36.4%; Hispanic|Latino applicants are up +30.9%; Caucasian|White applicants are up 21.2%; Canadian Aboriginal|Indigenous are up 20.0%; Native Hawaiian|Other Pacific Islander applicants are up +17.8%; American Indian|Alaska Native applicants are up +17.0%; and Puerto Rican applicants are up +2.2%:

LSAC 1-5

Not Indicated applicants are up +32.0%; Man applicants are up +26.2%; Woman applicants are up +24.6%; and Gender Diverse applicants are up +20.4%:

LSAC 1-6

First Generation College Student applicants are up +22.4:

LSAC 1-7

Mike Spivey, Predicting the 2024-2025 Law School Application Cycle (Early Data):

By the end of the cycle, we anticipate an increase of +10% to +15%. The first applicant numbers we are seeing will be way higher than the overall cycle (looking at percentages relative to last cycle), which again will cool off. We expect to see a cycle that ends up with a more natural increase relative to the prior cycle, which is not uncommon for an election year. Nothing will stay up over 20% like it is now or higher like the early numbers might show. If I had to guess an exact number, I’d say +12% when all is said and done. ...

I think we’ll likely see a 5% class size increase or so for fall 2025. Law schools have to fill seats to stay funded, and the more seats they fill, the more funded they are. So if we see a 12% increase in applicants but a 5% increase in matriculants/class size, that’s essentially a 7% more competitive cycle (the exact math is a bit funkier, but it’s a close approximation). Not so bad. And while you can’t control the competitiveness or the pace of admissions, what you can control is your application strength, which matters more in a competitive cycle, and especially this cycle more than ever due to the de-emphasis by U.S. News on admissions numbers in the overall rankings.

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