Derek Muller (Notre Dame), A Deep Dive Into How Law School Admissions Offices Approached an Influx of Applicants:

There are four major ways that a law school could approach the surge of applicants, to varying degrees and in varying combinations.

First, a law school might reduce its discount rate. That is, if there is more demand for law school, scholarship totals could be reduced. On average, schools saw increases in scholarship awards, but it does not appear those increases outpaced inflation on the whole. …

Second, a law school might increase its class size.

More demand might allow some schools to grow. We know overall enrollment increased, about 7.5%. … [O}n the whole, schools did not grow as quickly as they might have given the surge in applicants. It reflects some caution or hesitation, at least from the bulk of schools.

Third, a law school might increase its incoming class medians. As I wrote years ago, in light of the new USNWR metrics, “chasing the median” is mostly a waste of a school’s time. As I highlighted elsewhere, it’s almost impossible for elite law schools to change their ranking based on LSAT medians these days, as long as they are holding serve with peers. … To calculate this, we can evaluate the change in LSAT percentile equivalent from one year to the next to see how schools did, along with the entering UGPAs (around 0.02 or so). Most schools saw very marginal improvements, 1-2 percentage points, in LSAT percentiles. …

Fourth, a law school might strengthen the depth of its class (e.g., the 25th percentile credentials of incoming students). … The best way to evaluate this using current data is to determine whether the school has improved the 25th percentile LSAT and UGPA metrics of incoming students. Because these are not used in the USNWR rankings, they are a window into how schools look at the “bottom” of the class for purposes of its depth, with an eye rightly on employment and bar passage. Sure enough, schools saw faster rises in their 25th percentiles, on the whole, in both LSAT and UGPA. …

[T]he first, aggregate part is out of the way. We can see how schools behaved on the whole. But how about the question of how individual schools behaved? I focused on just the more elite law schools, again, crudely, the top 100 of the USNWR rankings.

To measure this, I created “scores” for each of these four categories. That came about by standardizing each school’s performance in these categories relative to one another, then putting on a scale from 20 to 80. An 80 means the school did the most with respect to this category—for example, it reduced its discount rates the most; it increased its class size the most; it increased its medians the most; it strengthened the depth of its class the most. A 20 means it did the least in that category.

Any score is not particularly “good” or “bad.” It is simply meant to show how the school behaved with respect to these four potential responses, relative to other schools. … As you scroll down the chart, you can see varying decisions that schools made with respect to admissions. There was no particular strategy across schools. …

Now for the complete data for all law schools. The categories in the spreadsheet are, tracking the categories above.

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