With the arrival of August comes the return of the academic year to most law schools. While May is full of final exams, graduation, and law school administrators treating their students very much akin to this

August is the reverse of that

Despite dreams of a perpetual summer, all good things have to come to an end. In the case of law schools, the first sign of the impending academic year is the return of rising 2Ls to the hallways for on-campus interviews (OCI). Although OCI is one of many facets of higher ed that has changed in the post-COVID era, the fact remains that many law schools administrators will go from “I haven’t had to wait in a line for the restroom in two months” to “why are there so many people in the hallways and why are they all wearing suits and—oh no!—they’re back!” in rather short order.

So as our AdComm friends return to the realities of the impending academic year, let’s take our weekly lap around the world of law school admissions.

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The August LSAT Looms

Given the numbers we’re continuing to see from the August LSAT, we thought that our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report needed a slightly more ominous title!

It’s August LSAT Eve and the numbers are still almost 30% higher than last year. Yowzers!

We’ll be curious to see what happens in the coming days, though, because of what occurred just a few weeks ago with the June LSAT.

The week before the June test, we were at 31,573 registrations.

The week of the test, registrations dropped almost 10% down to 28,872. At the time, we boldly/foolishly wrote that “[t]his brings us below our long-stated ‘best guess’ prediction of 29,000 test takers for the exam. Regardless of the drop, we’re almost assuredly going to see an increase of 10%+ in test takers over the June 2024 exam.”

That prediction looked fantastic … for about one week. Which is why we don’t often head to the racetrack with our “these bets are sure to win!” attitude.

In the days leading into the June LSAT, an additional 5,000 registrants changed their minds and didn’t take the test. While it is common to see a number of registrants get cold feet just before the test, this was a far greater number than usual. It would take an even greater percentage of last-minute changes to bring the numbers for the August 2025 LSAT below the August 2024 edition.

Meanwhile, the numbers for the September LSAT have remained remarkably stable (down just 0.7% in the past week) and we’re still two weeks away from the registration deadline for the October exam, but the numbers are already climbing steadily.

So ignore our poor track record of predictions! This is our gold-plated lock for the year (no refunds, void where prohibited): we are still feeling confident that the present LSAT numbers are indicative of another strong year for law school applications.

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This Week in The Shifting Landscape of Higher Education

And our other gold-plated lock for the year (patent pending, trademark incoming) is that we’ll continue to see movement on this front in the coming year.

On Tuesday the 29th, the Attorney General’s office issued a guidance letter to federal agencies regarding best practices for how groups that receive federal funding should approach federal antidiscrimination laws. Although not specifically directed at colleges and universities per the introductory paragraphs, the letter appears geared towards that industry.

Among suggested best practices and legal warnings, the DOJ mentions:

• The “[l]egal pitfalls of DEI programs.”
• “Unlawful Proxy Discrimination” based on matters that could best be broadly defined as “diversity statements.”
• And guidance on “demographic-driven criteria” as “facially neutral” means to increase enrollment among certain racial groups or gender.

Such guidance letters do not have the bearing of law. However, they signal the Department of Justice’s intent on how they will interpret various laws going forward.

On the surface, this would not seem to have much bearing regarding law schools’ applications for the coming year. While it would be prudent for admissions officers to check with their General Counsel’s offices, it would seem that Chief Justice Roberts’s guidance in the Students for Fair Admissions case would be the best guidance regarding the use of personal statements and diversity statements to enroll broadly diverse classes. Per Page 8 of the SFFA syllabus:

“[N]othing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

What will be more interesting to examine will be how financial aid offices interpret the guidance on “facially neutral” scholarship programs. For instance, it is reasonably common for alumni to donate funds to a university and to give a stated preference to students from the alum’s geographic area. In our previous life as a director of admission, we helped with the selection process for one such program. It’s also very common for alumni to direct financial aid towards those incoming students who are the first in the family to attend college and/or law school. Yet, the DOJ’s guidance specifically notes that they believe “[i]ntent to influence demographic representation risks violating federal law” and specifically cites as examples a “scholarship program must not target ‘underserved geographic areas’ or ‘first-generation students,’” if those categories have been chosen as proxies for preferential race and/or gender-based admissions programs.

So on the surface, a completely theoretical scholarship program to support law students from Kansas should be alright … but what if someone wanted to create a scholarship for students from more racially diverse areas? Or to support women who are pursuing areas of the law that are traditionally dominated by men? Per the DOJ’s guidance, such programs would appear to be venturing towards the danger zone for litigation.

But it’s also worth reiterating to our audience of future lawyers that guidance letters are not the same as case law. Any such litigation brought on a college or university by the Department of Justice would likely end up in the courts. It’s in that venue—the courts—that case law would apply and Chief Justice Roberts’s aforementioned words would seemingly feature prominently.

In the meantime, the best indication of how schools have reacted to this guidance letter will be when they publish their application instructions. Will there be significant changes to diversity statement prompts and/or questions that ask about an applicant’s race, ethnicity, and/or gender? Or will things look the same as in previous years? We’ll keep our eyes peeled to schools’ websites in the coming weeks!

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7Sage Events

Our next Admissions AMA classes will be on August 6th and 13th. As a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

In other classes, Ethan Madore will host one on August 8th about how to learn from application mistakes, while Kamil Brown will host another on August 21st on preparing for law fairs and LSAC Forums.

Our most recent law school admissions podcast dropped last Monday and features a conversation about JD/MBA admission. Who are the candidates who should pursue a dual degree? Does applying for a dual degree make you more competitive … less competitive … or do the admissions officers even notice that you’ve applied to both programs? For answers to all those questions—and more!—be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!

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