Top Law Schools

last year Law schools saw an increase in applicants. the increase was substantial 3% or 4% here, 6% or even 11% there according to these articles from last February.
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... hbxlogin=1
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... ss_than_1/

But this year we are witnessing something entirely different. Schools are reporting 35% increases, 52% increases, etc. The Oct 2009 LSAT had 20% more testtakers than last October. That means we have more applicants and applicants are applying to more schools. See these articles from this year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/education/10grad.html
http://www.cornellsun.com/section/news/ ... 52-percent

The schools have not indicated that they plan to take in more students (as far as I can tell). Some may take a stab at increasing their median numbers and others, especially those at the top, may just maintain their numbers with a larger pool of waitlistees. In any case I fear that this is going to mean a lot of confusion on both sides of the admissions decisions. Applicants may end up on more waitlists. Schools won't know where they stand as far as increasing their medians so they will be building larger waitlist pools. Every year there are students who don't get off the waitlists until August. This year I fear that there is going to be a lot of shuffling as applicants commit at one school, stay on the waitlist at another, get accepted then commit to another school, reject the first and create chaos down the line.
Everytime I log onto a status checker I wonder if I am still going to be doing this in August.

I know that here at UVA they're supposedly aiming for a smaller admitted class and a WL pool to fill in the gaps with over the summer. However, this was their strategy last year too and more people than expected agreed to come here, so they ended up not needing folks off the WL anyway.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Schools are having a hard time gauging students' interest in attending. This is why Penn almost universally WLs folks who don't write a "Why Penn" essay, it's likely a driving factor for UVA extending their ED deadline, and it will probably lead to similar actions at other top law schools to filter applicants based on interest in attending.

vanwinkle wrote:I know that here at UVA they're supposedly aiming for a smaller admitted class and a WL pool to fill in the gaps with over the summer.

that is good for me!

Honestly, as much as waitlisting sucks, it does help schools figure out who really wants to attend. Even short of borderline obnoxious behavior like mine, people can and do make their interest known successfully. I have a classmate who got in on the last day of orientation by showing up in our admissions office and telling them he still wanted to come. I admire the hell out of him for doing that. I do think we'll see more eleventh hour admissions, but some schools may also have the UVA problem- uncontrollably high yield.

I got waitlisted at UVA and I know others have gotten in with numbers similar to mine (175/2,98) when they did the late ED thing. There are a couple of schools that I would go to immediately if I got accepted but I am afraid I;ll be waitlisted at all the top schools. Maybe I'll just do what Opera's friend did and show up on their doorstep in August saying please, please.

It's a weird, weird storm this cycle. It's really going to shake things up for splitters and for people with the past year's median LSAT numbers in the T14. We're seeing 3.8x/172's WLed at CCN, when those numbers would've probably be admitted last year. It seems like only LSAT's above last year's medians and GPAs above 3.9 are safe from economy-driven app increases...