Law School Applicant Volume Up from Last Year

Prospective law students are coming out in droves for the 2023-2024 admissions cycle. The number of applicants for Fall 2024 matriculation is up four percent compared to the same point in the application cycle last year. And the pool is expected to continue to grow based on the registration volume for the January LSAT, which is up 15 percent from last year.

The diversity of the applicant pool has also increased compared to last year, which is notable because last year’s admissions cycle yielded the most diverse law school class on record. According to Reuters, the newly published LSAC data shows that over 43 percent of the applicant pool is made up of minorities and that the number of minority applicants has increased by seven percent from last year. Hispanic applicants have increased by almost nine percent, Black applicants by just over seven percent, and Asian applicants by six percent. The number of White applicants has held stable with growth of just one percent year-over-year. 

Last Summer, when the Supreme Court disallowed the use of race as a component of university admissions’ decisions, many in the legal and academic communities expressed concern that it would negatively impact underrepresented applicants and would discourage students of color from even applying. To counteract this, many schools updated their outreach and even their application components with the intention of encouraging minority students to apply. While it remains to be seen how many of the applications will turn into law school acceptances, this applicant data is encouraging. 

Related: A Compelling Diversity Statement will Strengthen Your Candidacy for Law School

Study Finds Law Students Overconfident in Their Expected Performance

A recently published University of Illinois Law Review study found that almost all incoming law students expected to rank within the top half of the class after their first year. The findings are based on a survey given between 2014 and 2019 to students who were entering the University of Illinois law school. The students were asked to predict their class rank after the first year of law school, and the study’s authors compared the predictions to the student’s actual rank. 

Students showed great optimism: 95 percent of the students surveyed predicted that they would end up in the top half of their class. And over 22 percent thought that they would be in the top 10 percent. Interestingly enough, the students who did end up landing within the top quartile of the class tended to underestimate their eventual ranking, while those who fell within the bottom quartile had significantly overestimated their final performance. 

The study’s authors, University of Illinois law professor, Jennifer Robbennolt, and University of Illinois law graduate, Sam Barder, expected that students would overestimate their performance because of past studies on overconfidence in professional and academic environments. However, Robbennolt noted that a few things about this study made the overestimation more significant. For one, the students took the survey prior to starting classes and had very little information on either the coursework and/or their classmates. And, many of the students likely enjoyed previous academic success and were top performers in college. 

“They are coming into a totally new environment,” Robbennolt said. “They don’t have much information about the tasks they will be asked to do and the kind of thinking they will be asked to do. They don’t know much about their peers.”

The authors noted that the study is important because it highlights how law schools might provide incoming students with more information on what’s ahead, which may help them to set reasonable expectations. 

Amidst US News Rankings Boycott, Law School Representatives Work to Provide Data Transparency

Last week, Harvard Law School and Yale Law School co-hosted a conference to discuss “best practices for law school data.” This is in response to the current U.S. News rankings boycott, which has prompted law schools to consider alternative ways to provide data transparency to prospective students and the public. The event included representatives from more than 100 law schools, 30 graduate-level educational institutions, and the Department of Education. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, in a keynote address, expressed support for the boycott, noting that rankings systems can create perverse incentives for institutions. “Rankings discourage institutions with the largest endowments and greatest capacity to enroll and graduate more underserved students from doing so because it may hurt their selectivity,” he said. “Instead, the most life-changing higher education opportunities go to young people who already have every socioeconomic advantage.”

Secretary Cardona encouraged those in higher education to “set the agenda” rather than allowing U.S. News to do it for them. However, the intricacies of making data available to prospective students wishing to evaluate graduate options, proves complicated. Currently the ABA site does not allow for easy comparison between schools and other existing data sources, including Law School Transparency, XploreJD, and the Law School Admission Council, lack a desirable user experience for reviewing and comparing data. 

Christopher Avery, a Harvard Kennedy School Professor with experience studying college ranking systems, noted that while transparency is critical, it is important to give careful consideration to what will be used as a replacement for the U.S. News ranking. He recommended against jumping from “one bad system” to “another system that may be bad in a wide variety of other ways.” 

U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal also expressed a need to move with thoughtful consideration. He encouraged conference attendees to “not lose sight of why the rankings are important.” And, in an interview afterwards, Kvaal expressed an interest in working with the U.S. News to make the ratings more equitable. He noted that the Education Department has reached out to the organization with suggestions for improvement.