First Look at National App Numbers

BY Jacob Baska

Last week, we noted that the middle of October is the busiest week of fall travel with law fairs from coast to coast. While the coming weeks will continue to be busy (and we’ll cover that in more detail in our “National Recruitment Events” section below), AdComms may believe they’ve gotten through the worst of it. But au contraire

Worst day so far

LSAC has finally published our first look at applications submitted thus far this cycle, and they’ve done so a few weeks earlier than usual. Perhaps their rationale was that if they waited any longer, the numbers would get so far out of hand that no one would believe them!

And so law school admissions officers know that they have a few more weeks to focus on recruitment travel, but that they then need to be ready to review some applications because—holy cow!—are there going to be a lot of them.

But enough with the foreshadowing! Let’s take our usual lap around the headlines from the world of law school admissions!


Current Volume Summaries Report

So let’s cut straight to the chase!

Relatively new readers will be familiar with one LSAC report that we analyze every week—the LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report. But there’s another important report that LSAC provides to the public that’s also very important for understanding the national applicant pool—the Current Volume Summaries report. This report provides year-over-year information on applications, applicants, applications submitted by geographic region, applications by LSAT scores, and more. It’s less a “treasure trove” and more akin to the amount of treasure one only finds in the presence of a dragon.

Smaug

LSAC usually begins to publish this report in late October, so it was a bit of a surprise when we saw that they published an article on their home page on the 13th, entitled “2026 Admission Cycle Is Starting Strong.”

And per a quick check, LSAC was underselling things a bit!

Applicants and Applications

Is it early in the admissions cycle? Yes, absolutely.

But are those numbers up significantly versus last year? Yes, absolutely.

On the left is a breakdown of law school applicants by the region that they come from. On the right is the number of applications submitted, categorized by where the law school to which an application has been submitted is located. For example, let’s say that an applicant living in California has submitted three applications to law schools in New York City. The applicant would be counted once in the “Far West” category for “Applicants,” while LSAC would add three applications to the “Northeast” category in the right-hand column.

Analyzing these numbers at a regional level is usually not as useful as considering them more nationally. To that end, we’re already seeing a clear trend—applicants are up 32% and applications are up 27.8%.

While this is a small sample size, this is absolutely connected to what we’ve been saying for months when analyzing LSAT registration and test-taking numbers—when LSAT numbers go up, so do applications.

To that end, we know that these applicant and application numbers may get another boost in two weeks because …


National LSAT Numbers

The October LSAT results will be coming back! And then right behind it will be the November LSAT! And that still looks like it’ll be a doozy per our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report.

LSAT Registrations

November LSATs declined by 0.9% over the past week after a decline of 0.6% the week before. That’s remarkably stable given how close we are to that exam. In the two-to-three-week window prior to an LSAT, it’s not unusual to see registrations decline by 10% each week. If that holds true for the November LSAT, that would bring us down to about 34,000 registrations come test day. While that would still represent a 10% increase over last year’s November LSAT and would represent the biggest LSAT in seven years (back when the LSAT was only offered six times per year rather than the present eight), you take your minor victories where you can!

But the main takeaway from the continued LSAT registration and test-taking numbers and the newly published application numbers from the Current Volumes Summary report is clear—national applications are going to be up this year.

Maybe the storm of apps isn’t fully up to gear

Hurricane

but things are definitely blowing around out there, and it’s starting to get gnarly.

Own goal


Decision Trends

We’re also starting to see a little more action with schools issuing decisions—’tis the season!

Over the years, we’ve found that the best way to track app decisions at a macro level is via lawschooldata.org’s “Recent Decisions” page. While we recognize that all information on lsd.law is self-reported and that individual results may be a bit questionable (perhaps an lsd.law user is inflating their LSAT a smidge, maybe they’ve decided to tell the world that Yale Law admitted them when—perhaps—the decision received was slightly less positive, etc.), the aggregate information usually gives us enough bread crumbs to glean trends.

A good example of this is UVA Law’s profile page. Here’s what we can tell so far:

  • Let’s first take a look at UVA Law’s applicant chart by GPA/LSAT and we’ll isolate just for the admitted students. UVA Law School Data
  • Right away, we can already start to see a vertical wall developing at a 174 LSAT. UVA Law moved its median up to a 173 this year. While it’s far too early to say that it’s trying to boost its LSAT another point during this cycle, we can see that it’s at least trying to leave that possibility open.
  • Now let’s take a look at its roster of applicants, sort this by the “Decision Date” column, and filter the “Result” column for only the applicants with an “Accepted” result. UVA Admits
  • First things first, we apologize for a screengrab with TONS of information. lsd.law updated its website in the spring. Prior to the update, we could have filtered out columns that we didn’t care about. Post-updates, you’re stuck with all this information. But we persevere and move on!
  • Right away, we can see that these are “RD” or “Regular Decision” admits. It’s not like UVA Law is just cherry-picking among strong Early Decision applicants. Also, the vast majority are being interviewed before they’re being admitted. Further, the turnaround time between an interview and an admit offer is very tight, sometimes as little as a day or two but never more than a week. And lastly, every admitted applicant either has an LSAT at a 174+ or a GPA at a 4.00+.

This is all pretty standard for UVA Law. It’s among the most aggressive T14s in admitting students early in the cycle. It also makes sense for it to be—to use that word again—aggressive in its statistical goals this early. From an enrollment management perspective, it’s much easier to adjust statistical goals down as the year goes on. That’s as easy as admitting some students with lower stats who are either on your waitlist or whose files you’ve held on to for just such a moment. But it’s very challenging to adjust your goals up. Why? Because once you’ve admitted a student, you can’t “un-admit” them. And if you’ve admitted enough students at a certain LSAT score band, there’s every chance that enough of them will enroll that there’s nothing you can do to overcome those numbers and push your stats higher.

And speaking of holding off on making decisions, it’s interesting to note a school we’re NOT seeing so far on lsd.law—WashU in St. Louis. Historically, WashU Law starts making offers of admission in September. By contrast, we’re not only not seeing any activity on its lsd.law profile, we’ve heard chatter from applicants who have interviewed with WashU that its admissions team has indicated that they’ll likely begin issuing decisions in January instead. Why would they do that? Perhaps to give their staff more time to evaluate applications. But perhaps it’s so that they can take more time to evaluate their applicant pool and national trends, and then set their admissions goals accordingly. Or to put it another way, maybe they feel like they’ve been admitting applicants too quickly in the past and have “locked in” a certain statistical cohort that—in hindsight—was lower than what they could have aimed for if they had held off just a little longer.

We’ll keep our finger on the pulse here to see the other trends that start developing in the coming weeks! Based on past years, we should start seeing decisions from schools like Georgetown, George Washington, and Michigan Law coming out shortly. Will they follow UVA Law’s path of holding to their standard operating practice? Or will they join WashU Law in holding off to let the national pool develop? Time will tell!

(And by "time," we meant "the future." Apparently Georgetown thought we meant RIGHT NOW because they started making offers of admission in the gap between writing and posting our blog. We'll have a bigger breakdown next week!)


National Recruitment Events

It’s another busy week out there for law fairs! Take some time to get outside and enjoy a conversation with an AdComm or two before they have to disappear for six months to read all those apps!


7Sage Events

Our next Admissions AMA will be on October 22. Stop on by and ask whatever law school admissions questions are on your mind! And with the October LSAT results coming back on October 24, we’ll have two sessions of our “What Does My Score Mean?” class at 12 PM Eastern and 4 PM Eastern.

The latest episode of our admissions podcast dropped on Monday, and it’s a loooooooooong recap of all the news and info that has happened in the past few weeks. What are the trends, topics, and news-you-can-use as you put forth your best effort in this year’s admissions cycle? We’re here to help! Be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!

Thanks for reading! You can learn more about 7Sage Admissions Consulting’s services here, and if you’d like help deciding which service is right for you, you can book a free consultation here.

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