Why August drives your dean crazy

As a prof, months that start with the letter “A” are the worst. In April you’re scrambling to finish teaching the material, you’re writing exams, and you’re making final plans for the summer. In August you’re scrambling to get ready for the first day of class, you’re scrambling to finish your writing, and you’re tying up whatever personal loose ends you have before the start of the year.

Oh, and you might have made the mistake of taking a vacation during August. Good luck enjoying yourself on that trip!

If your dean still writes or teaches, he or she may have some of this August angst. However, your dean has other things to worry about, too.

August is the time for melt, and that drives your dean crazy. The incoming class probably had to make two deposits to hold their place, the second one usually in early or mid July. In theory, everyone who made that second deposit will show up for class and actually enroll. Thus your dean could sleep soundly once the second deposits are in.

However, there are always some students who, after making a second deposit at your school, decide to attend a different school or decide not to go to law school after all.

These students are said “to melt” and the collective reduction in the size of the incoming class from the second deposit to the beginning of school is called “the melt”. You’d be surprised at how much melt can occur in the last week before classes start.

The melt plays merry Hell with things your dean cares about. First off, the LSAT and GPA of the entering class may start declining. The students who melt to attend other schools likely do so because they got accepted at the last minute off the wait list of a school further up the food chain. Typically these students have above-the-median (for your school) LSAT/GPA.

Second, depending on the vagaries of the melt, the incoming class’s gender and racial diversity might become quite different from what they were at the time of the second deposit.

So, the dean and admissions team have some quick decisions to make: Will the melt be so large that we’d better admit people off the wait list or else the class will be too small? If so, how many do we admit and how long do we give them to decide? If we go to the wait list, who do we choose and do we award them any financial aid?

The wait list is not actually a “list” in the sense of a rank ordered set of names. It’s more of a pool. Most schools look carefully at that pool and try to find someone comparable to the person who withdrew. The admissions staff often has a pretty good idea of which wait list candidates are likely to accept, which are not, and how many financial aid dollars it might take to get acceptances.

All of this needs to be done in a compressed time frame, of course, because classes start anywhere from the 15^th to the 31^st of August. Your dean needs to make time for dealing with these admissions matters while also handing returning faculty issues and start-of-the-year issues from the university.

And, of course, taking students from your wait list probably means you’ve added to another school’s melt. There’s a true cascade effect for schools that compete with one another for students.