LSAC Newsletter Page 1

November 2018

The fall has been a busy and productive time at LSAC. We are vigorously expanding our assessment, data, and technology services to benefit the future of legal education as it continues to evolve along with the legal profession. Notably, LSAC re-engineered its operational structure from the ground up over the summer for a high level of agility and an even higher level of service. At the same time we accomplished this comprehensive redesign, we also both kept pace with a high volume of ongoing work and made enormous progress on several major initiatives that are described below.

Kellye Testy
President and CEO
Law School Admission Council

Applicants

At this early stage in the 2019–2020 admission cycle, there is positive news for the number of applicants overall as well as the number of applicants in high LSAT score bands. As November begins, both applicants and applications are running higher than last year at this time, with 11,810 applicants submitting 56,705 applications for JD programs. Of 201 law schools, 16 are showing an increase in applications of 50% or more. Applicants with 160+ LSAT scores are up about 15.4%. Please note that early volumes can be highly volatile and comparisons to last year’s data will change on a day-to-day basis until more of the cycle is complete. Daily updates are available at LSAC.org.

LSAC will be introducing several initiatives over the next few months to provide more and better data and research to our member law schools and to generally advance the availability of reliable data on legal education. For starters, beginning the first week of November, LSAC research scientist Dr. Josiah Evans will host a new podcast Keeping Up to Data. The first episode will dig deep into what the early volume data means. Each podcast will break down the latest volume data and other data of interest to law schools. Announcements with links will be sent via email before each podcast, and episodes will be available at LSAC.org. Stay tuned!

Because over 99% of applicants begin their enrollment journey by taking the LSAT, testing volumes also provide insights into the future applicant pool. Test volumes in one year will influence the applicant pool for the following year. Because we have expanded test dates significantly, test volumes for this year are not directly comparable to prior years. However, using the most comparable figures available, test registrations for the June through September time frame show volume comparable to this same time last year at over 69,000 test takers, with two-thirds of those first-time test takers (that percentage has been very stable over many years).

ABA Applicants and Applications

ABA Applicants Year-to-Date as of November 6, 2018