As the spring semester ends and summer begins, pre-law pathway programs across the country are preparing to welcome new cohorts of prospective law students. These programs have faced recent challenges, from tectonic shifts in the legal landscape to increasingly competitive admissions cycles that favor well-resourced applicants.

Since 2024, I’ve been piloting a grant-funded, data-driven pre-law pathway program that emphasizes participants’ awareness, engagement, and belonging with respect to law school. Details on this collaborative project and some preliminary data, below the fold.

After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, commentators predicted substantial declines in diversity among law schools’ entering classes. Although the overall share of students of color among 1Ls dipped slightly in 2025 (and dropped more for schools in the top quartile of selectivity), the diversity “cliff” hasn’t hit law school enrollment in the same way as undergraduate enrollment or law firm hiring. Of course, law school admissions may not have reached a post-SFFA (or post-Executive Orders) equilibrium.

Pre-law pathway programs both reflect and shape these post-SFFA trends. These pathway programs generally seek to increase law school enrollment among populations historically underrepresented in legal education. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, many such programs eliminated eligibility requirements that expressly referenced race or ethnicity. But these pathway programs may still expand access to legal education in ways that ultimately support a more diverse legal profession. The key is to identify an underserved target population, then collect meaningful evidence to evaluate the program’s effect.

Over the last two years, I’ve designed and implemented a novel pre-law pathway program in collaboration with Metropolitan State University of Denver, an access-oriented public institution with a student body that’s 60% first-generation and 57% students of color. The Colorado Pre-Law Pathway Partnership employs a long-term, wrap-around intervention designed to address socio-emotional factors that may affect whether MSU Denver students pursue law school after graduation. The CPPP is funded for two years by a generous grant from the AccessLex Institute.

The CPPP’s principal components are ten weeks of in-person summer coursework at the University of Colorado Law School and nine months of mentoring with a current law student, along with more conventional support for LSAT preparation and the LSAC application process. Because MSU Denver students tend to have strong Colorado ties (and families, and work), the CPPP’s local partnership structure draws participants who would not seek out a multiweek residential pre-law program. The CPPP finished its first cohort this spring and has onboarded a second cohort for the summer and fall.

The theory behind the CPPP’s intervention is that, unlike many pre-law pathway programs, participants’ exposure to legal education should be tangible rather than virtual and longitudinal rather than episodic. The goal is to affect the levers that predict persistence and success in the law school application process and beyond. For this project, the relevant levers are participants’ awareness (experiences of people and place), engagement (interest, investment, and motivation), and sense of belonging (acceptance, authenticity, and cohesion), each with respect to legal education. Belonging, in particular, has garnered substantial attention through a burgeoning academic literature in legal education, and premier pathways such as LSAC’s Plus Program recently have incorporated belonging-based strategies.

The CPPP tests this theory through a quasi-experimental design and extensive data collection. Throughout the intervention period, participants are surveyed on their attitudes about law school and their progress in the law school application process. Qualitative data complement this quantitative component: participants do multiple interviews, as well as weekly journaling. The limitation, of course, is sample size, since the CPPP’s high-touch intervention can handle only a small number of students per cohort. The goal is a deep, mixed-methods dataset that paints a rich portrait of participants over time—something that I believe is unique in research on legal education.

One year into the project, the preliminary data are encouraging. When counting “top two” responses on a five-point Likert scale, treatment group participants’ awareness of legal education (measured by multiple items) increased by 67 percentage points over the course of the intervention, compared to 24- and 29-percentage-point increases for the study’s two comparison (control) groups. Treatment group participants also reported big gains in their prospective sense of belonging: 66 percentage points, compared to 20 and 21 percentage points for the control groups. By contrast, engagement was more muted, with a 25-percentage-point gain for the treatment group and 4-percentage-point bumps for both control groups—a sign that CPPP applicants already had powerful intellectual commitments to law. These results hold for a scalar (average score) analysis of the survey data. Although sample size makes statistical significance harder to establish for these data, the strong directional changes support the intervention’s positive effect.

The first-cohort data reflect a very strong response-shift effect, with participants retrospectively downgrading their pre-program ratings of awareness, engagement, and belonging. This recalibration isn’t uncommon for self-assessments, though the shift also introduces uncertainty about the absolute magnitude of any effects. For treatment group participants, the downward “pre” shift was triple that for the control groups (30% versus 10% and zero), which may signal that the intervention helped treatment group participants develop a better understanding of what legal education entails. Moreover, qualitative data support a conclusion that the CPPP’s intervention made legal education more concrete, more navigable, and more imaginable for a cohort of students who had limited prior exposure.

The treatment group also fared better in terms of objective outcomes, including offers of admission in a very tight application cycle. Most participants, however, delayed law school applications for strategic reasons, to work, or to address financial, family, or personal needs. For participants in the treatment group, these deferrals often reflected persistence with a plan. Interim employment was law-adjacent, LSAT retakes were scheduled, and application packets were well on their way. For these participants, taking more time is reasonable, and data collection on this cohort will continue.

But the CPPP’s first year suggests that an intensive, relationship-oriented pre-law pathway program can change how students understand legal education and their relationship to it. For treatment group participants, the program’s intervention made law school concrete and moved them along in the application process. For some, the program accelerated their matriculation timelines. That’s what pathway programs should do.

These accomplishments are meaningful for the first cohort in a pilot program. The next question involves the program’s second—and final—funded year. Will fresh data from the second cohort confirm, refine, or complicate these findings? Given the CPPP’s first-year results, there’s a good reason to keep watching.