LSAC and Predicting Law School Applicants for 2016-17, Part 19

The LSAC is now reporting that "As of 04/15/16, there are 325,833 applications submitted by 50,130 applicants for the 2016–2017 academic year. Applicants are up 1.4% and applications are up 1.6% from 2015–2016.  Last year at this time, we had 89% of the preliminary final applicant count."  Now that we're past mid April I guess we can pretty confidently predict that we're hit bottom on the number of applications.  We'll have about the same number of applicants as last year, maybe slightly more people.  This fits with what I'd predicted last July.  We'll not know for months how many of these applicants will end up in law school, of course.

The previous post in this series is here.

Comments

[Anon]

What are the applicant numbers by LSAT score? Last year I read that, while the overall drop was small, there was a huge drop in high LSAT scorers applying and a substantial increase in low LSAT scorers applying.

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

There are excellent posts on this site that I enjoy as a non-academic type of attorney. However, these continuing posts are really an embarrassment to the academic world and the profession. Given that this is now the 18th such post in the series is truly evidence that students are just numbers to be milked for tuition money. Its no different than some of my fellow practitioners who milk a file or churn a file for a continuing source of fees. A Law School education should speak for itself.

[PaulB]

Anon 12:04, the distribution of applicants by LSAT score has turned around this year.

http://blog.spiveyconsulting.com/2015-16-cycle-data-as-of-3-8-16/

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

This type of thinking is the height of irresponsibility. It appears you are desperately BEGGING for new students to attend law schools in a glutted market where not a single new lawyer is wanted or need in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the University of Washington is proposing a NEW law school. There is a message in those two inconsistent facts.