7Sage Blog

Travel Season Is Here

BY Jacob Baska

With Labor Day in the rearview mirror and the first few law fairs on the docket, law school admissions officers have officially entered Travel Season.

Suitcase Packing

For the next few weeks, AdComms will spend as much time out of the office as they will in it. They’ll also be far more used to recalling their frequent flyer and hotel rewards account numbers than they will their loved ones’ birthdays.

And if Labor Day has passed, that also means that we’ve hit one of the most important days of the year for law school applicants—application release day! While there are no ABA regulations or quirks of LSAC’s online system that encourage schools to open their applications on September 1st, most law schools do so for reasons both traditional as well as strategic.

Regarding the former, many things in higher ed happen for no other reason than “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it.” There’s a good bit of truth to that with opening applications on September 1st—it’s just how it’s been done, ergo, that’s just how it’s going to be until forced to do otherwise. And regarding the latter, we can re-acknowledge the aforementioned Travel Season. Releasing an application to the public before attending law fairs gives admissions officers something to discuss with prospective students at recruitment events. And if that prospective student likes what they hear at the event and wants to apply, they can do so immediately rather than waiting until a future date when the application opens.

But speaking of applications opening, our blog this week is coming to you a smidge later than usual because we at 7Sage HQ have been quite busy over the past few days to update the page on our website that tracks every school’s application requirements. Be on the lookout for us to publish said updates in the coming days! But back to the topic at hand—let’s take a quicker-than-usual run through the headlines in the world of law school admissions before we get back to updating pages on our website!

Updated Class Profiles

One more week into the new academic year, another week of seeing the same trends emerge from law schools’ class profiles!

As we noted in last week’s edition, the main trends we’re seeing from class profiles are:

  • T14: LSAT medians are holding steady and GPA medians went up a touch (i.e., less than 0.05). Class sizes stable.
  • T15-30: LSAT medians went up a point and GPA medians went up a touch. Some variation of class sizes in the +/- 10% range, which is both “something” but also not “crazy.”
  • T31-Beyond: A bit more of a wild kingdom. LSAT medians sometimes going up by two points. GPA medians going up by more than a touch (as much as 0.09 in some cases) but also going down in other cases. And some truly surprising fluctuations in class size.

Regarding that last point, our current leaders in the clubhouse who are representing opposite ends of the “Class Size Fluctuation” game are:

  • Catholic Law who increased their class size by 46% from last year (going from 126 1Ls last year to 184 this year).
  • Baylor Law who shrunk their class size by 50% (103 1Ls versus 206 last year).

What gives on the fluctuations?

Well, there could be a few things at play. In the case of Baylor, it’s possible that they were deliberately targeting a smaller class size this year. Enrolling a smaller class typically makes it easier to boost the medians of an incoming class. An old joke in admissions circles is that everyone can enroll a class with better medians than Yale … as long as we only have to enroll about five students in the class … which, admittedly, isn’t a funny joke, per se. But that strategy would have seemed to have paid off for Baylor since they increased their LSAT by two points and their GPA median by 0.08. This is also a strategy that schools like Florida Levin have pursued in the past in order to boost their academic profile—cut the class size for a year or two, boost the median stats, and then sit back and wait for the increased U.S. News & World rank to follow.

Meanwhile, Catholic Law’s admissions team may have read the tea leaves of national LSAT test-taking trends and application trends and decided that they could boost their medians and bring in more students at the same time. Why would enrolling more students be a good thing? Because it means more tuition revenue. And as long as there aren’t severe negatives regarding space in classrooms, having to add new sections of 1L classes, or concerns about post-grad hiring (since it’s easier to find jobs for a smaller class than a bigger class), more tuition revenue is never a bad thing from an administrative standpoint.

National LSAT Numbers

But enough about last year! Let’s come back to the present and check in on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report now that the August LSAT results have started coming back and the September LSAT is finally here:

LSAT Registrations

Regarding the August LSAT, we can start a new “hot streak.” Beginning in October 2023, each month’s LSAT had more test takers than the same exam in the previous year—October 2023 had more test takers than October 2022, November 2023 had more than November 2022, etc. That streak got snapped in June when LSAT test takers went down by just 0.007% versus June 2024. We wondered at the time whether that was a blip or the start of a new trend, and it seems like we got our answer with August’s increase of 18% over the August 2024 exam.

Related, Joe DiMaggio famously holds the Major League Baseball record for most consecutive games played with a hit—56 straight games in 1941. In a sport full of completely wild stats, this is perhaps the most statistically improbable record possible given how difficult it is to get a hit. But the real insanity isn’t the record. Rather, it’s that his 56-game hitting streak ended … and he immediately tacked on an additional 16-game hitting streak right afterwards. We feel like the LSAT hot streak may approach that territory….

Speaking of which, the September LSAT is here. Registration numbers have remained strong over the past few weeks before dropping by a very normal 10% since our last blog post. We won’t know the final numbers until the end of the month, but we’re almost assured of the September 2025 LSAT exceeding the 2024 edition by at least 10-15%.

And looming off in the distance like Godzilla beginning to emerge from the water is the October LSAT. We’re still a month away from test date, and the registration numbers will surely come down, but it’s also quite possible that we see a 20-25% increase in test takers versus last October.

When you add it all up, what do you get? A forecast for another very competitive admissions cycle. Keep working hard on your application documents, study hard for the LSAT (and get a good night’s sleep the night before), and be ready to submit your applications in due course!

National Recruitment Events

Oh, and maybe consider attending a law fair or two!

There are a few events coming up in the next week+:

Everyone in the middle of the country will just have to wait until next week! (No joke—that’s when we’ll start seeing the law fairs at several Big 10 universities, and they’re real Big 10 schools.)

7Sage Events

Now that we’ve insulted the athletic departments of UCLA, Oregon, and USC, we invite everyone to our next Admissions AMA on September 3rd with another session to follow on the 10th.

On September 4th, we’ll have a mock admissions committee comprised of several of our former law school AdComms. Ever wonder how law school admissions officers review applications? What kinds of things that they pick up on? How snarky they can be when discussions get heated? Then we’ll see you on the 4th (and we promise to be on our best behavior!).

Our most recent law school admissions podcast dropped last week and walks new applicants through the ins and outs of the upcoming admissions cycle. Be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts! Our next episode will come out Monday and will feature a conversation from our August Law School Deans’ Roundtable.

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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