In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco has a discussion with two Spivey consultants—Joe Pollak, former Associate Director of Admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, and Nathan Neely, former Director and Associate Director of Admissions at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law and The University of Houston Law Center—all about the waitlist process. They talk about which applicants law schools waitlist and why, how law schools use their waitlists, how many people they typically put on the waitlist, the timeline of the waitlist process, what factors law schools consider when they evaluate their waitlists, strategy for getting admitted from the waitlist, common mistakes, best practice, factors that go into your chances of admission, tips for visiting a law school while you're on their waitlist, ways that the law school waitlist process has changed over the last few years, and much more.
We mentioned a few blog posts in this episode:
- How to Write a Law School Letter of Continued Interest" (outline included)
- What's the difference between a law school 'waitlist' vs. 'hold' vs. 'hold tight email'?
- Podcast: Justin Ishbia — Last WL Admit to Successful Major Donor
You can find the previous episodes in our deep dive series here:
- Personal Statement Deep Dive
- Experience/Perspective Essay Deep Dive
- Resume Deep Dive
- Addendum Deep Dive
- "Why X" Essay Deep Dive
Nathan and Joe's full bios are here.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can read a full transcript of this episode below.
Full Transcript:
Anna: Hello and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions. I'm Anna Hicks-Jaco, Spivey Consulting's president, and today we're continuing our "deep dive" series. We'll be discussing, in depth, the law school admissions waitlist process.
We get into waitlist fundamentals, understanding how waitlists function, and how law schools look at and think about their waitlists. We get into waitlist strategy, of course, letters of continued interest, other touchpoints, best practices, common mistakes. And then we go through some common questions from Reddit, including discussing schools that group their waitlists into different tiers, some newer developments in the law school waitlist process and things you may encounter that weren't really even a possibility just a few years ago, whether waitlists are sometimes "soft rejections," whether and how to bring up scholarships in the waitlist process, and more.
I'm joined today by two of our wonderful consultants, Joe Pollak and Nathan Neely, and I'll go ahead and let them both introduce themselves.
Joe: Hi, I'm Joe Pollak. I'm a consultant with Spivey Consulting Group, and I was formerly an admissions officer at the University of Michigan Law School, where, among other things that I did, I had a lot to do with the waitlist process.
Nathan: Hi, I'm Nathan Neely. I am also a consultant at Spivey Consulting Group. I've been at a couple different institutions—South Texas College of Law at Houston, University of Houston, University of Nevada Las Vegas—and have absolutely worked with waitlists broadly across each of those institutions.
Anna: Well, thank you both for joining us. You both bring that perspective of having been admissions officers who were evaluating applicants to be admitted off of the waitlist as well as speaking to and communicating with applicants who are on the waitlist, and then you both, of course, advise many applicants on the consulting side in their strategy for getting off of waitlists. I know that you both have tons to offer for this conversation. I know that it will be helpful for applicants who are staring down the barrel of a waitlist, which is never fun, but, at the same time, the waitlist process is how many applicants get into their super-reach dream schools. So, I think it's an important topic to talk about.
So, let's start at, fundamental level, let's understand law school waitlists. Who do law schools put on their waitlist and why? And of course, this is going to vary, but can we cover some of the most common scenarios?
Joe: Well, I think if you get invited to participate in a waitlist, you can make some assumptions. One assumption is that you're admissible to that school—that your academic profile, your skills, and abilities have been judged to be somebody who they could admit. Now, obviously, they didn't choose to admit that particular person because they invited them to the waitlist, so that's, you know, second-best. But you can certainly assume that they think, on some level, they could admit you. And, you know, it's a second-place prize, but that's something there.
The reason why schools use a waitlist is just because this is a very difficult process for them to manage. They want to get exactly the right number of students. They have a target that's probably given to them by the law school dean or by the financial people at the law school for the amount of tuition dollars that they should raise. They want to get exactly the right number of people in the class, and they want to get exactly their targets for LSAT median and for GPA median, and maybe some other factors too. And it's hard to just absolutely get that right on the first try. And so law schools are going to put people on the waitlist to fill in where they need to fill in.
Nathan: I think of it as, when I'm reading the applications, "Is this person a definite yes? Are they a maybe? Or are they a no?" So, it's kind of going through that triage of their application. How do I feel about this applicant? Are there, again, those admissible characteristics that Joe referenced? As Joe said very eloquently, it is a second-place prize, but it's a second-place prize that can turn into a first-place prize for a lot of folks.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. To get into a little bit more specifics, I think oftentimes, people are put on the waitlist because they have really strong characteristics of their application and then other parts that are weaknesses or potential detriments, either to the school's numbers or because there's some issue in the application. Maybe there was a really weak interview, maybe you came across just really not interested in the school, maybe there was some unprofessional communication with the law school. Lots of things can play into it. But also, there are many people who are waitlisted who have nothing "wrong" with their application. They submitted a great app, they have numbers that are in range, but just for whatever contextual factors—you know, maybe they have enough people who have your particular profile at that exact moment, but maybe they'll lose people later on—there are lots of situations and scenarios that can result in someone being on the waitlist. And it might be that there's some negative component of your application, whether that's numbers or elsewhere in your application process, and it might be that there's not. So I wouldn't make huge assumptions that "there's something big and wrong with my application," although that can sometimes be the case.
So I wanted to ask about, how many people do law schools waitlist? And of course, this is variable, but I'd like to cover the range of possibilities.
Nathan: I think my rule of thumb was, if the entirety of my admitted class dropped out, where would I be? I would carry a similarly sized waitlist compared to the pool of students I was hoping to see in class in the fall. So roughly, admits at 100, waitlist at 100, for example.
Joe: Yeah, I've seen something similar in my experience, and I've heard that as well from other admissions officers—that their target, if we were going to call it an industry standard, which there isn't really, but if we were going to call it an industry standard, I think saying, "If I admit a hundred people, then I will also invite another hundred people to the waitlist." The place where that changes is for schools that, on the top end—the most selective schools, which have really high yields—don't need to do that. They don't need to carry a huge waitlist, because they're very confident that the people who they admit are largely going to say "yes" back to them. There's only a few schools which are really in that category. And on the other end of the spectrum, there's other schools where they don't have the luxury of making such choices, and they put people on the waitlist, just absolutely anybody who is admissible but who they just didn't choose to admit. And that may mean that they reach a limit where they've literally exhausted everybody who they could possibly go through, and they don't have a waitlist that's very large, but that's just because they didn't get as many applications as a much more selective school.
Anna: Yeah, one thing I will note with that is that there are, of course—as with pretty much everything that we say in this episode and in all of our podcasts—there are exceptions. Certainly, there are some highly ranked schools that do tend to carry very large waitlists. That's not necessarily going to be the same from year to year, so I don't want to call out any specific schools as, oh this school tends to have a huge waitlist, because that might be different this year, and that might be different next year.
So, thank you. I think that's helpful for sort of understanding, okay, if you’re on a waitlist, you're probably not in a pool of like 20 other people on the waitlist. It can vary, but in most cases, you're probably not in a very small group, and in some cases you might be in a really large group, but it really depends.
So let's talk about the timeline of a waitlist. If you are someone who has received a preliminary decision of a waitlist, when is that happening, I guess is the start of our timeline. And then, what should they be looking at in terms of the timeline ahead?
Joe: Most schools send out waitlist decisions in waves, and where they may make admission decisions like, one by one, where it's "Oh, it's a Tuesday, and I just want to admit this person; let me call them right now and admit them, or let me email them and admit them," they're much more likely to collect those potential waitlist candidates, put those files all together, and on a certain day—once a month, or once every two weeks, or however frequently they do it—send out a significant number of waitlists all at the same time. What we hope that they're doing, and what most schools are doing, is they're re-reviewing those files before they waitlist them. So if they preliminarily decide that somebody's going to get waitlisted, then they'll look at them again; maybe they got a new LSAT score, or maybe another letter of recommendation came in, or who knows why, they're going to re-review them shortly before they send out that message that says, "We're inviting you to the waitlist."
At that point, though, once you get that message, you should probably assume that you won't get any further good news until after that school's deposit deadline. Now, that's not a hard and fast rule, but that's kind of what you should assume. It does happen that people are admitted from the waitlist in February or March, April, before a school's deadline, but it's much more likely that the school is going to return to look at the waitlist only after their deposit deadline.
Nathan: I think, because of the programs that are admitting people in February and March, before the majority of deadlines, there are some communications that will come out within the waitlist that actually reflect, "Hey, we might be looking a little bit earlier. Please ensure you have some message to us by X date," so that they're encouraging their applicant pool to, yes, continue that communication as a waitlisted candidate, but understand that there may be some movement that we're going to see prior to when we traditionally will start looking at our waitlist. So you definitely want to be paying attention to that in the communication that they provide you as a waitlisted candidate.
Anna: Definitely. I think that's going to be probably a theme of this podcast, to pay very close attention to what law schools are telling you, because law schools do have different processes with regards to the waitlist, and a lot of them are very specific about what they do and don't want from you.
So we're going to get into that soon. But I'd like to cover quickly just the latest component of this timeline, which is that, even after that deposit deadline, when a lot of schools are going to be making some waitlist admits—and probably their largest group of waitlist admits, although that can certainly vary—the waitlist process can and often does go into the summer and right up until orientation, essentially. Because people can drop out right up until orientation and sometimes during orientation, for various reasons. You know, maybe they got in off of the waitlist of another school. Maybe something personal happened, and they, you know, decided that they were going to take a year off or not go to law school at all right now, whatever it might be. So, law schools do lose people who have deposited and who they were expecting to matriculate to their class right up through orientation time. And they can admit applicants from the waitlist right up through orientation time. So, of course, it doesn't make sense for many applicants to stay on the waitlist all that time. You know, lots of people want to make concrete plans earlier. That is completely understandable. But if you are willing to stay on the waitlist right up until the very end, you're probably going to be in a smaller pool at that point.
Okay. So, you are an admissions officer, you are in a law school, you are looking to admit from your waitlist. You've lost some people, it's after your deposit deadline, and it's time to evaluate the waitlist. What factors are you looking for?
Nathan: I think I'm probably going to start with the LSAT. You know, the LSAT is one of those tricky numbers that, if you don't have the numbers that shore up your median, you could be at risk of losing that in October when the numbers are collected and passed along to the ABA. I think the LSAT is probably where I would start, just to ensure, "How am I doing on my median? Am I locked in? Where am I at?" Again, to get a sense and a read of where my numbers are as far as my goal for the cycle.
Joe: Yeah, a really fluid characteristic to look for here is "yield." Admissions officers use that term to refer to the number of people who they admit who actually choose to matriculate, who actually show up on the first day of classes. So, significant to the waitlist—and perhaps even more significant than in the regular admissions process—"Is this person actually going to come?" And as you move further and further through the waitlist process, there's more of an expectation that an admissions officer would look at a file, and if it's July and the last time they heard from that candidate was February, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean doom for that candidate's application, but it does mean that they're going to go toward the bottom of the pile, that they're less likely to be the first person to get a call. Because the admissions officer is going to say, "Oh, wait a minute, Nathan just sent us a nice email last week. I bet he's still interested. Let me call him first," before they get to that person who they haven't heard from for months and months. And as the waitlist process goes forward, if you end up in the process where it's late summer, late July, August, right before orientation, it's critical. The admissions office does not have time to call a second person, so they want to make sure that the first person they call is going to say yes. In the very early part of the waitlist process, that's still important, but it's less important.
Anna: Yeah, yield is very important in the waitlist process—as are the numbers, as they continue to be throughout this part of the process, as through the rest of the admissions process.
So I think, if I'm evaluating a waitlist and I need to admit people, that's coming from a place of, "Okay, we are missing some people in our class. We want to have 200 people in our class, and we got our deposits back, and we have 165," or however many. I'm looking at that pool of deposited applicants, and I'm saying, "Okay, what am I missing? I have a target LSAT of X, I have a target undergraduate GPA of Y, and with this class, where do we come in with regards to those medians? Where are my medians going to land?" And if my LSAT is "Okay, we're strong, we've got a decent margin, we're at our target median LSAT," then that is something that I would be less likely to be, you know, looking for all really high LSATs when I admit some people from the waitlist, versus if I'm under my target LSAT, then I'm definitely looking for especially those applicants who are at or above the target LSAT. And that's the same for GPA.
Now, if I'm—especially later on in the process where I'm not missing a ton of people in my matriculating class and my deposits—but instead maybe just looking to admit a few people off of the waitlist, oftentimes in those cases—and, you know, it varies from school to school and it varies from cycle to cycle—but if my numbers are in decent shape, then oftentimes I'm looking at more of those soft factors and looking at the applicants who have been in touch and who are sort of on the admissions office's radar, "Oh, this person is wonderful, but we just haven't been able to admit them for whatever reason." So a lot of it depends also on what the current deposited class looks like.
So let's get into strategy. We have sort of a basic understanding of, okay, why do law schools put applicants on the waitlist? How do they evaluate the waitlist? So let's get into sort of concrete strategy. If you're an applicant, how do you get in off the waitlist? First, let's do, I suppose, an overview of waitlist strategy. Would one of you like to give that general overview?
Joe: Yeah. A bunch of this is out of the control of the applicant, and they need luck. I don't mean luck like it's random or it's not predictable. Luck like they can't control it. So they need to have the stats that the admissions office is looking for. A lot of the people who end up pursuing the waitlist are going to be splitters or reverse splitters. They're going to have an LSAT score that's above median and GPA that's below median, or the other way around. Certainly, there will be people who will be above both medians who will be invited to waitlists. A lot of those people decline the opportunity to pursue the waitlist because there are high numbers candidates, they have options at other places, and they say, I'm less interested. Not always the case. But the majority of the people who the admissions office is really looking at on the waitlist are splitters. So, good news for splitters, this is your chance. Now, you can't control, though—if you have a high LSAT score, you can't control whether the school is looking for a high LSAT score in that moment. If you have a high LSAT score and a low GPA, and the school happens to be at that moment really needing high GPA candidates, you're sunk. There's nothing you can do. And that situation may change by the end of the summer, but at that very moment, there's nothing you can do. That's the part where you need luck.
Supposing you're in a situation, though, where the school says, "We're pretty good on LSAT score; we're pretty good on GPA; what we just need is another person. We just have room for more people," or you're in the situation where you've got the number that the school is looking for, in that case, it's all the same factors that the admissions office is always looking for, right? It's, "Did they write a great essay that told us all about how interesting they are or what kind of diversity they would offer to the class, or have they convinced us that they've got a really great idea for what their law career is going to look like, and we think they're going to be a really successful lawyer when this is all said and done?"
Another important factor here is this yield factor. "When was the last time we heard from this person? Do they seem like they really want to come here?" So, I would say strategically, you want to be in touch with the schools. A lot of schools will give you some guidelines on this. They'll send out their own emails that say, "Hey, the next time we're going to look at the waitlist is on X date. So if you want us to consider your file with some new information, make sure you send it to us before X date." If you've got something new that has happened to you, you've got new grades, you've got a promotion at work, you've got some kind of an award, anything like that, those are all good reasons to ping the admissions office and let them know that there's something new that's happening with you. All of those things make you a more interesting candidate, and compared to the person who doesn't have anything going on, all of those things are to your advantage. There's no one of those things that's absolutely critical to do, though. So this is a game of putting together a lot of very small things and hoping that cumulatively they have a big impact.
Nathan: But I think you want to key off of the deposit deadline. That is like the traditional start for a waitlisted applicant to really focus on, okay, I want to make sure that I have some sort of outreach to the law school to ensure that they are aware that I remain interested, and even though I might have responded to the waitlist email back in November or February, I still want to make sure that they have this formal, "Hey, I'm still here. I'm still very interested. I'm a viable candidate for you."
Joe: Yeah.
Nathan: And so that comes from being aware of what the school's deadlines are and, of course, either anticipating preemptively before the deadline comes or ensuring that it comes in that day after as the school's kind of looking at their coffers and seeing who submitted their deposits and checking their lists and all the fun things—I guess the holidays are still in my mind, so it's all about checking the lists. They're looking at, where we are with our deposits at the deposit deadline? And that's really when you want to start to key off of, reflecting that you're a viable candidate, whether you're a splitter or not.
Joe: Looking at it from the other perspective—and I'm curious to know if this is the same for you, Nathan—but when I was in the admissions office, the dates that I had in mind for when I’m likely going to lose people from the class, and therefore need to admit from the waitlist, would be the first deposit deadline, because that's when I find out who's coming. At my school, there was a second deposit deadline. Some schools have a third deposit deadline. So all of those time periods would be popular moments for people to say, "Oh, actually, I'm not coming. I don't want to send you any more money." And I would also say that when tuition bills came out, which the admissions office had no control over, right? That was a completely separate part of the university. But when those bills showed up, that was, again, often the time period when people would say, "Oh, actually, I've decided to take a year off." But what about you? Was it the same?
Nathan: Somewhat, yes. So, when you have, like, different crops of admits, right, when you have a rolling deposit deadline, there are some schools that have that initial deposit deadline and that's going to be true for all of their applicants, whether they were admitted two days prior, but there are other programs—I was one of those programs—that we would have that initial traditional deposit deadline, but then there would be like two or three dates following that to kind of allow for the later offers of admission so that they can get to an admitted students day or something to that effect. So, similarly, certainly, but with a little bit of a tweak.
Anna: That's a good point about rolling deposit deadlines, because that's certainly the case at many schools where, where depending on when someone is admitted, especially if they're admitted late in the process, they might have a different deposit deadline rather than just one central deposit deadline.
One point I will make on that is that every year, we, Spivey Consulting put out a blog with law school's seat deposit deadlines. And we do that for specifically this waitlist process. We do not do it for admitted applicants who need to reference and see what their deposit deadline is. If that's you, you should check in with the specific school as opposed to going off of our general blog. So, the reason that we put out that blog is for waitlist strategy, so that applicants can know when is a good time to reach out. Because, as you've both been talking about, that is when schools see which of their admitted applicants are actually attending and which have decided not to pay a deposit, which have decided they are not attending that law school.
And that timing is important because, all else equal, the more recently you reached out to a law school to reiterate your interest, the better. Now, there are certainly boundaries to that. If you're reaching out every day, if you're reaching out every week, that's a negative. That's not going to help you. But in general, if I'm looking at the waitlist and I see someone who, a week ago or a few days ago, sent me a letter of continued interest saying, "You're absolutely my top choice, and if you admitted me, then I would immediately deposit, and I'd be so ecstatic to come," I'm feeling pretty confident that's still the case because they submitted that fairly recently. But if that last communication is from two months ago or three months ago, things very well might have changed. This process is very dynamic. That person might have gotten into their dream school since then. I don't know. So, in general, it's a positive for you for your most recent communication to have been pretty recent when a law school is going to evaluate their waitlist. And you can't always know when that's going to be, but one pretty good indicator that they're going to be looking at their waitlist is a deposit deadline. So, definitely, we would encourage you to look at those deposit deadlines. And as we were talking about, schools sometimes just communicate and tell you exactly when their deposit deadline is or exactly when they plan to evaluate their waitlist.
One caveat to all of this is that schools do have different processes with regards to their waitlist. So, as a sort of general rule, I think we like to talk about reaching out every four to six weeks or so, depending on, you know, whether you have reasons to be reaching out—you know, substantive updates—or whether you're just saying, "Hey, FYI, I'm still interested," but some law schools do not want that. Some law schools will tell you very specifically, "Send us one letter of continued interest, and we do not want to hear from you apart from that unless you have a substantive update." That's sort of a very, very general rule of thumb, but it does vary from school to school.
Joe: Yeah, this is something that I think is really difficult for applicants to do on their own. From what I can see as a consultant, the resources that I have access to, and, you know, my experience, I can often read what's going on with the general waitlist process. And that's because I know what's going on with lots of different clients, lots of different applicants. We have access to data to see that, if school X just admitted a bunch of people with a certain profile, and I have a client who's got a similar profile, then maybe I want to tell my client, "Hey, I think now's the exact right moment for you to be communicating with that school." Or sometimes we can see, hey, we have another client who just got admitted to a higher-ranked school, and they're probably going to go there, and so maybe that's going to open up a spot. Maybe the school doesn't even know yet that they're about to lose somebody, but we know, and possibly that can be to the advantage of a particular waitlisted candidate to know that's the exact right moment. But that's not something that a general applicant has access to, right? That's only something that I can do based on experience, based on the data that we have access to.
So, if I was going to talk to somebody who was going to go through the waitlist process on their own, I would tell them to stick to the deposit deadlines. That's the information that they have that they can make use of.
Anna: Let's talk about letters of continued interest, because that is the fundamental building block of the waitlist process in some ways. For pretty much every school, you know, their processes vary to some degree after this, but if you receive a waitlist and you want to pursue that waitlist, you should be writing them a letter of continued interest.
Joe: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think one thing to think about is there's so much of this process that the applicant does not have control over. But one part that the applicant does have control over is whether they participate in it or not, just at all. So, I think the way you can think about this is, just because you're invited to the waitlist doesn't mean that you have to pursue the waitlist, or that you have to pursue the waitlist all the way down until orientation begins. You have control over it. But if there is a school that you're interested in and that you'd like to go to and you'd like to be admitted off the waitlist, then yeah, I think you should assume that you're going to be writing them at least one or maybe more letters of continued interest.
Anna: So, let's talk about that initial, most robust letter of continued interest. Because you might be sending updates and sort of reiterations of that interest later on in the process, but typically the one that is going to resemble a "why" essay, sort of the full letter of continued interest, is going to be one time and usually fairly early on in the waitlist process, though it might depend. What advice, generally, in terms of best practices, common mistakes, do you have for someone who's sitting down to write their first letter of continued interest?
Nathan: I think when an applicant doesn't acknowledge what it's called—a letter of continued interest—and they write a blurb or they write a new statement or they write something that is not a letter. Just generally, you want to go back and look at your application, look at the materials you've already put together, you've collected, you've sent on to them. You've got at least one statement, one essay. You've got a resume. You've got the fields in the different applications. So you’ve already given them text. You've already given them this kind of like dump of information. Take the time to craft a letter. What does a business letter look like? Is it the same style and format as the statement that you put together for your personal statement? No, probably not. So, you want to go back and actually do a letter—use the address block, direct it to some individual, either the dean for admission or the admissions committee, some style that is, again, acknowledging that this is to a specific person or specific people within the program.
But then, yes, it is very much a "why" statement. How are you aligned with the school? Why is the school so important to you? Why is the school so critical to you? Those are all questions that you want to answer in the letter of continued interest. By no means should you be creating a letter of continued interest that you can then replace a school's name and put another school in that position and send that out. You know? You do not want a cookie-cutter letter of continued interest. You want to be very tailored and very thoughtful as to why that program, again, is so important to you that you're willing to wait, which is what you're doing. You're waiting to get a decision. And so, again, it's putting that effort and energy into a letter, and then being mindful of what you've already sent them and not contradicting anything that you've already put in your application materials to communicate with the admissions office.
Joe: I'd start with asking what's new about your life; what updates do you have? And maybe you don't have that many updates or things that you consider to be all that big of a deal. I once had a client who I asked this question to, and she said, "I did have that book deal that I just got."
Anna: Oh my goodness.
Joe: And I said, "What? You just got a book deal?" And she had reasons why that wasn't such a big deal; it had been a long time in the making, and she'd kind of, you know, moved on from it. But that's going to get the attention of the admissions office. It doesn't matter whether you think it's a big deal. It's just convenient; it's a helpful way to write this letter if you can write it around some sort of update.
So, the kinds of more realistic updates that you might get if you don't have a book deal would be new grades from the end of the term. Maybe you have another letter of recommendation that somebody will send on your behalf. Maybe you've got some update from work—you got a promotion, you are working on a new project, you just finished some project, anything like that. And again, it's not that the exact letter of recommendation that you might get is so critical here. It's not that any one of those strategies is the key strategy, but it's just helpful and a way to write your letter and to write it around, here's an update for what's been going on.
One thing that I would definitely do if you do something like this, if you take my advice, is be specific in your letter of continued interest. So, if you say, "I've got new grades, and I just sent them to LSAC," in that email, in that letter of continued interest, you should put exactly what your new calculated LSAC GPA is. And if you say, "I'm sending in a letter of recommendation; you should be receiving it through LSAC," you should put the name of the recommender who you expect that they will receive a letter from. When I was on the receiving end of those kinds of emails when I was in the admissions office, the first thing I would do would be to check their file and say, "Okay, they said that they're sending in a letter of recommendation. Have we received it yet?" And if I can't tell because I don't know who the letter is supposed to be from, then it's not that helpful to me as the admissions officer.
Nathan: I will say, I'm a little hesitant to include an update in the letter of continued interest only because you're then taking that opportunity for that sort of outreach away from yourself later.
Joe: I respect your position, but I have a different strategy, which is that I think you should do everything you can to be admitted and not save anything for later. I mean, what if that's the year that that school is admitting people in March? They didn't tell you they're going to admit people in March. But what if that's the year? I would say do everything you can and worry about tomorrow when it's tomorrow.
Anna: I tend to think that, if you have something that is a substantive update to your application that makes your application stronger—so you have updated grades, and that has increased your GPA, or you have a letter of recommendation that is providing sort of a new dimension to your application or to your profile that your other letters of recommendation didn't really speak to—I think those substantive things you don't want to hold back early on in the process just because you're retaining them for later on. I do think it's a good idea to retain—especially if it's sort of redundant, it's not making a big substantive difference in your application—I do think it's a good idea to retain reasons to reach out and touchpoints that you can utilize later on in the process so that you're reaching out and it's not just, "Hey FYI, I'm still here and I'm still interested." That's fine, it's not problematic in and of itself, but it is nice to be able to say, "Hey, I have this update," or, like, "Hey, I have this new letter of recommendation" later on in the process.
And how Mike Spivey likes to talk about this—he talks about how he hates this analogy every time he uses it, but in the now, what, over a decade that I've been with Spivey Consulting, I do think he's been using it the whole time, so we're going to lock in this metaphor. Mike likes to talk about it as cannonballs. So, you are in a battleship, and you have a battleship off on the horizon in the distance that you are shooting your cannonballs at. You have a certain number of cannonballs. You do not have unlimited cannonballs—which, again, as we talked about, you do not want to be sending a law school updates every single week; you do not want to be telling them all the time that you're still interested; it just shows a lack of professionalism and judgment. So, you only have a certain number of times that you really can reach out to the school and sort of cannonballs in your arsenal. Are you going to send out all of those right at one time? I certainly understand Joe's perspective of, if those are substantively helpful for you and are improving the quality of your application, then, like, yeah, you probably don't want to hold those back. But if they are sort of just, here's another reason that I can reach out, you don't necessarily want to be sending out all of those cannonballs right at once. You want to wait until that ship is closer. Because the later and later on that you do get in the waitlist process, the narrower the pool is, because people drop out. Right at the beginning of the waitlist process, you might be part of a huge pool, versus right before orientation, not a lot of people want to stay on a waitlist that late and are actually reiterating their interest as "I would actually be willing to come to your law school the week before orientation or the first day of orientation." So, you're looking at a much smaller pool at that point.
So, there are arguments to be made to retain reasons to reach out to a law school later on in the waitlist process, but I think that it's nuanced. You know, it depends on the specific type of update, it depends on the specific thing that you would be sending to a law school, and it depends on a lot of other contextual factors I think in a lot of cases.
Nathan: Well, and some of them are even outside of their control. If you submit a transcript to LSAC, LSAC is passing that information on in the new updated GPA, regardless of whether you want them to or not.
Anna: Yeah, I wouldn't retain your updated GPA until May, I mean, if it's from your fall semester.
Nathan: Same for an LSAT, right? If you take an LSAT, that will be passed along to the law schools regardless of what you direct or not.
Also, I want to take a quick moment and say, per the ABA reporting and everything, your highest LSAT score is what the school reports. That's whether it's in August, right before orientation, or in November, prior to even submitting your application. The point is, it doesn't matter when you take the LSAT. They always report your highest score within their median.
Anna: Yeah, I've actually gotten the question from a few people recently, the question was, essentially, "I was waitlisted at this school. Should I retake the LSAT to try to get in off of the waitlist?" And my answer is, if you think you can get a higher LSAT score, that's certainly not going to hurt you in the waitlist process. Now, of course, there are so many personal considerations in determining whether or not you want to retake the LSAT. You know, it can be a huge undertaking, and maybe it makes sense in your life and maybe it doesn't. But in terms of admission strategy, if you think that you can score more highly on the LSAT than you have, then if I were in those shoes, I would be retaking the LSAT.
Joe: I agree with that. I would say that, if you think you'll go from below the LSAT median to above the LSAT median, that's where it's going to make the most impact. If you're already above the LSAT median, you can retake it, and I don't know, maybe it'll help, or maybe it'll help for a different school or something like that, but that's less helpful.
Anna: Yeah.
Joe: I would be talking about how my resources are best spent in that situation.
Anna: One thing I will also note is that we have a blog post that includes a general outline for letters of continued interest. We're going to be linking that in the description in our blog post for this episode, so you can reference that if you're looking for just a very general sort of starting point outline for a letter of continued interest.
So, very early on, either when you first receive the waitlist or maybe, depending on the school, depending on what they are telling you they want, you wait until their first deposit deadline, you write and you submit this first letter of continued interest. That is probably going to be the sort of longest and most substantive communication that you are going to have with the law school, or at least written communication that you're going to have with the law school, throughout the waitlist process, most likely.
Now you've got the rest of the waitlist process. As we talked about before, we generally recommend staying in touch with the law school to some extent, with decent intervals of time in between, but letting them know, you know, you are still interested, and finding reasons to reach out. Those can be just another sort of mini letter of continued interest where you're reiterating your interest. It can be an update. It can be an additional letter of recommendation. You have those sort of future touchpoints.
Let's talk about, generally, what are best practices for communicating with law school admissions offices? Whether that is through email, or another potential waitlist touchpoint is you go visit. When you're communicating with a law school admissions office, what sorts of best practices should you be aiming for, and are there any common mistakes that you should be avoiding?
Joe: This is so obvious that I maybe don't need to say it, except that when I was in the admissions office, I saw this happen every year. If you go to visit a law school, you should be nice to everyone. The person who sits at the front desk is not the admissions officer who's formally evaluating you. That person, if they give a negative report and say "this person was really rude to the front desk," you better believe that's really going to hurt your chances of getting admitted off the waitlist.
Anna: For sure.
Joe: I think it's a good idea to visit law schools. I'm not saying that if you're on ten waitlists you need to spend thousands of dollars flying all over the country going to ten different schools, but if you're admitted off the waitlist, you're probably going to be asked to make a pretty quick decision. So I think it's a good idea to have already visited the school so that you're prepared to make a quick decision and say, "Yeah, I actually want to attend that school. I'm ready to accept the offer." That can be something that can be helpful for you down the road, too, as you think about a future letter of continued interest. You'd be able to say, "Yeah, when I visited the school last month, I had such a great time on the tour, and I met this student or that student, or I sat in on this professor's class, and all of those reasons made me want to attend your school even more."
If you can't visit, because maybe it's just prohibitive or you don't have time, you could talk to alumni. You could talk to people you know who have had experience at that school. And you could do much the same thing, and again, you could mention this in a letter of continued interest in the future. You could say, "I had a great conversation with my friend from undergraduate who's now a 2L, who told me this and this and this about their favorite professor, and it really makes me want to come to your school," and also, that's helpful for you in the sense that if you're admitted, you're going to need to make a quick decision. So it's a good opportunity for you to gather that information.
Finally, I think that if you've got a lot of waitlists, it can be helpful to sort of have a general idea in your mind of how you rank those different schools, of how you rank those waitlists. If you get admitted to one of them, then maybe that means you're no longer interested in some of the other ones. And if that's the case, if it's helpful for you to be able to go through that exercise and identify what your top choices are, then maybe you want to marshal your resources and your time and energy towards those schools that you're really actually the most interested in.
Nathan: I think when it comes to specific visits, though, one key factor of that is to ensure that it's an official channel visit. You don't often want to just show up and say, hey, I'm here, what can you tell me? A lot of programs will go to great lengths to ensure that there is waitlist programming either in the spring or in the summer, and certainly most programs will have a guided tour or a self-guided tour that you can come and check in at the admissions office to obtain. But again, I think one of the key elements is making sure that you're being above board and going through the proper channels when coordinating that visit to the program.
Anna: Definitely.
Joe: And no one dislikes a thank you note. So if you send a thank you email after something, that's a way that you can document, "Hey, I was there." That email is definitely going to get attached to your file.
Anna: Other general advice for communicating with law schools, in general throughout the process but especially during the waitlist process: you definitely want to be eminently polite and professional in all of your communications. You also want to come across as enthusiastic for the school. You shouldn't be going over the top in every single email that you send, "Oh my goodness, you're my dream school, I would do anything to get in," but generally expressing your enthusiasm, expressing the fact that you are excited for the prospect of potentially attending that school, that you're enthusiastic about the school—that's a good idea in the waitlist process.
Anything else for communications with law schools?
Joe: If you had contact with a particular admissions officer at some point in the process, like maybe you went to an LSAC forum and you met that specific person, or maybe you went on a campus visit and that's the person that you met with, or you've just been emailing with a particular person, it's useful to continue those relationships. Most admissions offices are pretty small and there's not really that many admissions officers in the office. It's very possible that you'll be talking to the same person over and over if you have multiple communications. But if you could win that person over, and imagine that they'll advocate for you—there's different opportunities for that in different offices; it doesn't always work—but that's certainly something worthwhile to keep in mind.
Anna: For sure.
Nathan: And just a small thing. Most of the law schools—actually, I would say 100% of the law schools—are dealing in PDFs. So anytime you're submitting a document, just have it ready to go in a PDF for them to upload into your file, that's just a nice courtesy and something that they can think fondly of you as they're advocating for you, potentially.
Anna: I like it; I like it.
Joe: How convenient you made their upload process.
Anna: I mean, honestly, a lot of what we talk about in this podcast—and certainly in the TikToks that I make—is really like advice that is on the margins. This is not going to make or break your application. But that said, you know, part of what we're out here doing and part of the information that we're trying to put out there for applicants is in the vein of trying to pile up all the little marginal positives that you can in your favor and avoiding all the little marginal negatives.
So we've talked a little bit about specifically letters of continued interest and their content a little bit, but also making it a PDF and other elements. We've talked about general communications with law schools, so when you're reaching out and you have an update or when you're reaching out and you're just reiterating your interest again.
More broadly, more generally, what common mistakes do you see in the waitlist process?
Nathan: The most common mistake I see is that, when an applicant gets their waitlist decision, their immediate response is to send that salvo of everything possibly that could overcome that decision right then, so like within two days or a week of getting the decision. Depending, of course, on when that decision comes to them, if they're getting that decision in November and they have submitted their letter of continued interest and all of their communication by the end of November, they won’t have that fresh outreach when it comes to the April 1st, the May 1st deposit deadlines. So I think that's probably one of the bigger mistakes that I see. So a waitlist candidate reacts with emotion rather than with strategy to the decision, and that can often lead to poor choices in how they're communicating with the school, and what they're communicating, and when they're communicating.
Joe: The mistakes I've seen are probably things that anybody listening to this podcast thinks are obvious. It's just failing to participate in the process. If you're passive through the waitlist process, maybe they'll call you if they get desperate enough, but you're really putting that in the hands of decisions that a lot of other people are making. You don't have control over this process, but the part that you have control over is being in touch with the admissions office and trying to do something—anything—to keep your name in front of them. It may not work, but it's definitely not going to work if you just do nothing at all and hope.
Anna: Other common mistakes that I have seen—reaching out just way too often. We've alluded to this a few times in this podcast. You want to stay professional and use your judgment. You do not want to be reaching out every day; you do not want to be reaching out every week.
The other thing that I see, often, is applicants who already start negotiating before they get in off of the waitlist. So this is something where, if you are on a waitlist and you're hoping to be admitted, you do not yet have a whole lot of leverage. So if the focus of your communications with a law school is not, "I'm really excited to go to your law school, and I think I'd be a great addition to your community," but rather, "I got these other admits, and I have this scholarship, and so, you know, if you gave me X scholarship, then I would be willing to attend," that sort of thing, that's not the tone that you want to be taking in your communications with the law school prior to getting in off of a waitlist if you want to maximize your chances. That's the other thing is, tonally and content-wise, already negotiating, already acting as if you have a lot of leverage in this process, which at that point, you do not yet.
Joe: General advice, I would not want to be the first person to bring up the scholarship discussion in the waitlist process. Now, on the other hand, there's a fine line here. If you're in a conversation with an admissions officer, if they call you and they say, "Well, we're not making an offer of admission from the waitlist today, but maybe in the future, and by the way, tell me about what scholarship offers you have," that's a different scenario. But that's when they bring it up and they ask you about it.
Anna: Yeah, good distinction there, for sure.
Nathan: You really want to be 100% about the program until you're not. So whether that's after you've received an offer of admission from the waitlist or even before that, until you have given up on that particular program or they've given up on you, you should be 100% focused on gaining admission and having an affinity for that particular program, in my opinion.
Anna: Let's go into some sort of miscellaneous other questions. As I do for these podcasts, I like to look around Reddit and see what sorts of questions people have been asking to see if we can answer those questions.
How is a waitlist different from a hold?
Joe: We've got a blog post on this, and the summary is as follows. Most schools use a waitlist. That's pretty universal. And not every school uses a hold. If they use something that's called a hold, that might just be something internal. It may not be something that they tell applicants about. But generally, the difference is that admissions officers see somebody who's been invited to the waitlist as saying, "We're not going to make any new decisions on your file until after the deposit deadline," and we've already talked about how that's not 100% true, but in general, that's how they view it. Versus, a hold is the admissions office saying, "There's some particular date in the future, and it's probably before the deposit deadline, when we're going to review your file again."
Anna: That's a good summary, and I'm going to link that blog as well in the description, so you can check it out if you're more interested in differentiating between a hold and a waitlist and sort of what they mean.
Are waitlists sometimes soft rejections? Is it sometimes the case that someone is almost certainly, or an admissions office knows almost certainly that they're not going to admit someone, but they waitlist them anyway as a way to soften the blow?
Joe: If that helps you go to sleep at night, I would say you should absolutely grab onto that and take that and cover yourself with that and have a good night's rest. It's usually not the case. More admissions officers take the rip-the-band-aid-off approach and say, if we're not going to admit you, we're just going to deny you. They're in the business of having to make decisions, so that's what they do. I think there's probably some circumstances where admissions offices are a little bit more hopeful. They really like this applicant, and the numbers just aren't there, but they really like this applicant, and that person ends up on the waitlist, and then somewhere along the line, the admissions office says, "I don't know what I was thinking, I should just deny this person," and you know, maybe later on in the waitlist process, they do end up getting denied. But I think for the most part, it's not a soft rejection.
Nathan: Thinking about the admission offices, the limited number of staff they have, and the time it would take to softly deny someone as opposed to just efficiently denying them or waitlisting them or admitting them, too much of a conspiracy theory, I think, if it's a soft deny.
Anna: I honestly think that if an admissions officer is thinking even in those terms of, "I know that we are going to want to deny this person, but I want to make it as soft as possible," for whatever reason, you know maybe you really like the person, whatever it might be, I don't think most admissions officers see giving them a waitlist as helpful in that process. If they know for a fact they're going to deny you, or they're 99% going to deny you, that's giving you false hope. That's making you invest your time and your resources into a process that isn't helpful for you. A sort of soft rejection or a soft denial, in my opinion, doesn't really make sense.
The one situation where I have seen something approaching a soft denial in the waitlist process—and it's very specific and probably will not apply to 99%+ of our listeners if any at all—is when someone is a special interest candidate. Maybe they have someone going to bat for them who's a huge donor at the law school or a prominent alumnus or something of that nature, and for whatever reason, the school's advancement office or their fundraising arm says, you know, we really don't want you to just outright deny this person, even though they have an application that would not normally qualify them for admission to this specific law school. I think that's very rare, and even in a lot of those cases, it does not result in a waitlist regardless, the admissions office says no, we're going to deny this person. But it has been known to occasionally happen.
I would say, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, if you are receiving a waitlist, that is because the law school could see admitting you at a later point in their process.
Joe: What I have seen happen is scenarios where there's a reasonably well-qualified applicant who just hasn't done everything they need to do in the application. And the admissions office is kind of scratching their heads, saying, "I can't tell if this person's really interested in our school, but let me kind of put them on the waitlist and see if they send a letter of continued interest and explain it more, or "They said here that they're going to take the LSAT again. Let me put them on the waitlist and we'll see what that new score looks like." That's not exactly a soft rejection, but that is a scenario where the admissions office is saying, "I'm not ready to admit, but I do like you, so let's see if something changes."
Nathan: Let's put the ball in your court—or I guess, let's put the cannon in your court.
Anna: That's a good point, Joe. I do think that there are cases where someone has a really great application, and the law school could see, would love to admit them, but with their current LSAT score, it's almost certainly not going to happen. But if they have a future LSAT administration, you might receive a waitlist on sort of the possibility that you could seriously increase your LSAT, even though without that increased LSAT, it might be quite unlikely that you're going to get in. That's very specific and only in some circumstances.
This was actually going to be my next question, and you already answered it. I was going to ask about yield protection in the waitlist process, and not in respect to trying to figure out who they're going to yield from admitting from the waitlist, but rather waitlisting someone or giving someone a waitlist because you don't think that they are going to attend even though they are otherwise qualified. So, this notion of yield protection generally is, okay, this is someone who has strong numbers and has a strong application and who otherwise this law school would be happy to admit, but because they think, "Oh, you know, I don't think this person is actually going to come to our law school, either because they have way higher numbers, or maybe they didn't write a why X essay, or maybe they used the wrong school name or something in some of their materials," this notion of yield protection: "We're not going to admit you because we don't think you're going to come." I think this used to be a much more common notion among applicants, I would say years ago, around when I was applying. I see it less and less, and I think that is a positive thing altogether.
Do, in your experience, especially recently when things have been less of an applicant's market—there have been more applicants, and things are easier on the law schools these last few years—do you see law schools giving applicants waitlists seemingly for yield protection reasons?
Joe: When I think I see it—because of course we're just speculating from the outside—but when I see it, it's more for those latter reasons. Those reasons like, "Well, they didn't take the opportunity to write a Why X essay and say why they want to go to this school." Or there's some inconsistency. The first reviewer in the office really liked them, and the second reviewer maybe didn't like them as much, and they're not quite so sure where it lands. Or, "There was something that wasn't so great about the interview, and it doesn't seem like they really want to come here. They were talking all about our rival school, and that's not a good look." Those sorts of things I do see happening, or at least I perceive them as happening. I don't think that it happens very often at all that especially a selective school would say "Your numbers are so high that we don't think that you're going to come here." Instead, schools would say, "Your numbers are so high, we're going to offer you a scholarship to bribe you to choose our school," rather than whatever higher-ranked rival they have in mind. I see that as much more likely. If they put those people on the waitlist, then they're saying, "We don't think you're ever going to come here, so we're going to put you on the waitlist," and it’s not useful to the admissions office, because then what if they want to admit them from the waitlist? And they already said "we don't think you're going to come here"? So then what are they going to do when their number comes up on the waitlist? I think that it’s much more likely to be a situation where that happens just because there's some sort of flaw in determining whether that candidate really wants to attend their school.
I had a client who wrote her application significantly around wanting to work with a particular faculty member who was in a very niche field and, no kidding, like, absolutely the top person in their field, hands down. She submitted her application, and she ended up going on a visit about a month later. And while she was visiting, she was chatting with an admissions officer and mentioned something about this professor who she was so interested in. And the admissions officer said, "Yeah, it’s too bad he told us he's retiring, and we don't know who's going to replace him yet."
Anna: Oh no!
Joe: My client was like, "Oh no, this is bad news." And we did what we could to sort of salvage the situation, but she ended up on the waitlist. Which she was kind of indignant about. Her numbers suggested that she should have been admitted. And I said, "I suspect that you got put on the waitlist because you wrote this essay all about how you want to work with this professor, they know that that professor is not going to be teaching while you're a student, and they're worried that you're not going to be happy there. If you really want to go there, you could probably write to them, write them a letter of interest and really explain your sincere interest in wanting to go to the school, even though that professor is going to retire, and they'd probably admit you if they had the chance from the waitlist." Now, what ended up happening is she said, "Yeah, but I don’t actually want to go there anymore because that professor’s retiring," and I said, "See? See? It worked! They were right!"
Anna: Funny, funny. That actually came up in our recent "Why X" Deep Dive, is if you're going to be talking about professors, try to talk about maybe a few professors, just in case a situation like this comes up. Now, I think this was an exception, because it's clearly this very niche area where this one professor was really the leading person in the country. That makes sense why that ended up being a focus, but certainly, this is a risk and something that can happen.
Joe: And in that particular situation, the admissions officer said, "We don't know who's going to replace this person." Most of the time, if a faculty member retires, you know, it's planned in advance, and there's going to be somebody else who's going to come up, who's going to teach those classes. But this was a particularly niche situation.
Anna: Yeah, I think if you're an applicant and you've received a waitlist, you're wondering, "Is this yield protection? Am I actually qualified, but they are just giving me this waitlist because I'm overqualified?" I don't think that's a useful sort of thought to necessarily explore. Like, how helpful is that for you to decide that or not decide that? I think it's kind of an exercise in futility. Where I think it can be maybe slightly relevant is if you look at your application or you look at your communications with a law school and you assess, "I really did not at all communicate my interest in this law school." Then, yes, your letter of continued interest can be a great opportunity for you to really emphasize your interest in that law school. That said, you should probably be doing that one way or another. Joe, I agree, it does not happen very often that a law school simply waitlists someone because their numbers are too high. I think that's very, very uncommon, and I don't think it's necessarily even all that helpful to you in your process.
Let's talk about a specific situation that applies to some specific schools. The vast majority of law schools have one waitlist, and they don't tell anyone, you know, you're on this special waitlist or you're in this particular place on the waitlist. That's most schools. Now, some schools do have separate waitlists that they let their applicants know, "You are on this tier waitlist," or "You're on this other waitlist." Do applicants who are not in the sort of top tier of that waitlist have a chance?
Joe: I think you should take the admissions office at their word. If they say there's a top waitlist and you're not on it, I think you should take them at their word.
Nathan: I agree with that, I agree with that. It's hard to look past not being part of the Platinum Select Plus waitlist and feeling like you might be able to manage to get into the program without being there.
Joe: There's circumstances where it can happen, you know if they blow through the top waitlist and they go to number two, sure. Or there's other circumstances where, for whatever reason, they maybe would ignore their previous waitlist ranking. But I would say, not a lot of hope.
Nathan: I have seen people migrate from the lower waitlist to a higher waitlist. But that comes from those substantive updates that you're able to offer—either a final semester GPA or a new LSAT score that helps boost your opportunities.
Anna: Yeah, I think that law schools that utilize this type of process do it at least in part because they want to help manage applicants' expectations and sort of not let someone get super, super hopeful that they're going to get in off of the waitlist if it's a more marginal chance. I think you should sort of accept that, ideally. You know, certainly if that school is your top choice, you should still be sending in that letter of continued interest and using those touchpoints and reaching out to them. But if you are looking at various waitlists and thinking about how you want to allocate your time and resources, that might not be your most likely prospect.
Okay, another question that I saw people asking about online was, if someone is in a situation where they are willing to attend a school with zero scholarship at all, for whatever reason; maybe they are independently wealthy and can just write the check, or maybe they have just already accepted that they’re okay with a huge amount of debt, or somewhere in between. For whatever reason, someone has determined they don’t need any sort of scholarship to attend. Is it a good idea to communicate that in a letter of continued interest or in some other communication with a law school?
Nathan: I think on the back part of that—not needing finances to attend the program—I think that's something that can be very compelling to an admissions office, considering that they are going to be getting a lot of people reaching out asking to renegotiate their current scholarships that are admitted. There's a lot of volatility, I would say, with scholarships up until the waning moments of the summer. And so, by effectively communicating that you do not need that and that you're not going to enter into that process with them, that can be very helpful because you're reflecting that you're reducing time, effort, and energy for them, which is always nice at that part of the cycle.
Joe: If I was speaking to a military veteran who was an applicant who was planning on using the Post 9/11 GI Bill, I would 100% tell them to beat that drum consistently in their messaging. And the way I would tell them to say it would be to say something like, "I'm in the position of being able to choose my law school based on factors that aren't financial, and I've chosen your law school," something like that. Make it sound really good. And that’s exactly right.
I do not think that applicants who are on the waitlist need to automatically assume that they won’t get a scholarship from the waitlist. There's definitely a lot of ups and downs that go through this. There are some schools that say, "If we admit from the waitlist, you definitely won’t get a scholarship." There are some schools that say, "This year, we've already spent our money, and you won’t get a scholarship." But I wouldn’t assume that you won’t get a scholarship. So, if you want a scholarship, I'm not sure I would just trade that away in the letter. Because if you write in the letter, "I don’t need a scholarship," they probably, even if you would have otherwise gotten a scholarship, they probably won’t give you one.
Anna: That's a good point, Joe, for sure.
Okay. Should you mention other schools that you're admitted to in your letter of continued interest, or in other communications with the law school?
Joe: Okay. I've seen this work—in a very specific situation.
Anna: Okay...
Joe: It is not a strategy that I can recommend as a general strategy. This is extremely nuanced, and it is high risk, and I cannot say enough that you should not say, "I've already been admitted to this better school, but I deign to come to your school instead." No matter what you think you're writing, you need a really objective third party to review your communication to avoid sending out that message.
Anna: Yeah, I think in general it's almost certainly not going to be a good idea. I think that where this question comes from is people are trying to establish their value and their worth more strongly, like, "Oh, look, this wonderful school wanted to let me in. Doesn't that tell you that I'm a great applicant and that you should let me in?" And to some extent, I get where that's coming from, but how strong an applicant you are to any given school is fully present in your actual application. Whether you are admitted to another school or not does not change the quality of your application or how "valuable" an applicant you are to a given school. Typically, we do not recommend that strategy. Are there cases where it could potentially work? Yeah—but it's a very, very, very difficult needle to thread, I think.
Joe: I'm making a face right now that indicates how risky I think that is.
Nathan: This is where I would tell the client that this is a lot like dating. And so when you are trying to woo someone, would you introduce someone else's name in the letter that you are wooing them with? Probably not. That's not something that would be overly warm and fuzzy-feeling for that other person. So, try not to include the name of someone else.
Anna: I like that analogy, Nathan.
Nathan: Thanks!
Joe: I think in an anonymous sense, you can certainly say, "You're my top choice, and I'm prepared to withdraw from whatever other school," without mentioning the name, "that I'm currently committed to." I think that's okay.
Nathan: I agree.
Anna: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s, further, a good idea to assert, if you are certain that if you are admitted to a school off of the waitlist that you will immediately withdraw all of your other applications and you will deposit at that school, let the school know. If that is your 100% truth, for sure let the school know. But there's no need to specifically mention, "I've gotten into XYZ school, and I would withdraw from them in order to go to your school."
Like all things in law school admissions, the waitlist process changes over time and develops with the applicant pool and with trends in admissions. What sorts of shifts and changes have you seen in the waitlist process over the last few years?
Nathan: One thing that we’ve seen pretty consistently is a shift from admitting people through normal parameters off of their waitlist to now admitting them under a binding process. So either they’re introducing a scholarship into their admission off of the waitlist that allows the school to perceive that they can bind the applicant, or just outright admitting the applicant from the waitlist but under a binding process that would make the applicant feel very restricted in what kind of choices they have after committing to that program if they elect to do that. So that’s probably been one of the bigger changes in waitlist decisions that we’ve seen.
Anna: Joe, did you want to add to that at all?
Joe: I’d say that I do not think this is a good development. This is happening at a couple of schools. We’re tracking that there are more schools that are starting to do this. It’s still the significant minority of schools, but this is a new year, and we don't know what's going to happen in the coming cycle. I don't think this is a good development, and I think that the public-facing parts of the admissions world also don't think that. And what I mean is that there's a statement that LSAC puts out, the Statement of Good Admissions and Financial Aid Practices. It's not binding on schools at all, but it’s admissions deans who have come together to write this statement of good practices. And the statement of good admissions practices is pretty direct in saying that this kind of inducement is not within best practices. And I agree. I don't think it's best practices to force an applicant to bind themselves. If they applied early decision of their own free will, that's great. But if they’re on the waitlist, to play hardball with them and say, "We're going to force you to withdraw from your other schools when you don't even know what's going to happen yet," I don't think that's fair at all.
Nathan: I agree. I understand the position that the schools are taking, that they want to have information locked in. But at the same time, you have to be responsive to the applicants. You have to have a student body that wants to be there. And so to bind people through that process, it’s an unfortunate development that I think we've seen. I do hope that you're right, Joe, that it was just kind of a test case in the last cycle, and hopefully we won't see it again this cycle.
Anna: Yeah, I do hope that it doesn’t become more common. Just because, applicants traditionally and most commonly are never really asked to withdraw from waitlists. They're able to pursue waitlists all the way up through however long they want to be pursuing those waitlists, unless they apply via a binding early decision agreement of course. But we have seen recently schools try to say no, you have to withdraw from all other schools, both those that you’ve been admitted to—which is, of course, very common ("Please deposit to our school and not other schools")—but also from schools where you have not heard back yet. Also from schools where you may be on the waitlist. And that’s not great for applicants. It’s not. So I do hope that it doesn’t become more common. I think, to some degree, there's an effect where the very first school that does it gets a lot of flack, but then, you know, once there are a few schools doing it, there's less attention on it.
So the follow-up question here is, if you are an applicant who receives an offer of this nature, what advice do we have for someone who receives this type of binding offer and would like to accept it but would also like to continue pursuing other waitlists?
Joe: This is extremely tricky. This is a very difficult position to find yourself in, especially if you're going through the admissions process without some kind of trusted advisor. I would start by looking for an objective opinion from somebody who you trust—maybe you've got a mentor, a pre-law advisor, if you're working with a consultant for sure, like one of our Spivey Consulting Group consultants, it’s definitely something to bring up with your consultant. But even somebody whose advice you trust. If you have the feeling that the offer that you’re being given off the waitlist indicates that the school is not very student-focused, then I think you should go with that gut feeling. If that feeling makes you say, "They made me this offer of admission, but under these conditions, it makes me want to attend the school less," then I think you should listen to your gut on that, in a general sense. Strategically, it’s pretty difficult. I think that it is possible you could contact another school and ask them what their opinion of it is. If you have a school that hasn't offered you admission off the waitlist, but you’d really like to preserve your opportunity, maybe you could call them and say, "Listen, I know it’s getting late in the process, but is there any hope for me? Because this other school is making me a binding offer." Maybe that school would be nice enough to say, "If you could put them off for a week, we might have something for you." Maybe that would work. It’s a low-percentage shot, but I think it’s worth trying something like that.
Nathan: I think being transparent with the schools that you are waitlisted with before committing to that binding opportunity is probably really helpful, just to give you an opportunity to see what those programs' perspective is on those binding offers, in addition to, you know, ensuring that you're not locking yourself in before you have some information that's helpful to you.
Anna: That's good advice. Thank you both.
Okay, so this is a question that I see all the time, that is very difficult to answer but we're going to give it our best shot. What are your chances of being admitted off of the waitlist?
Joe: I think the waitlist is the most opaque part of this admissions process, and your chances could change from school to school; they could change from cycle to cycle; they could change within the current cycle, week to week, month to month. All of that means that it's really hard to predict your specific chances until you're in the moment of exactly that moment, trying to decide. But I would fundamentally say, schools admit off the waitlist. They put people on the waitlist, they invite them to the waitlist because they plan to use their waitlist. And almost every school uses their waitlist every cycle. The schools that have the luxury of not having to rely very much on their waitlist are few and far between. Most schools use their waitlist because they have to.
And there's a few schools out there which probably don't, strictly speaking, need to use their waitlist, but they strategically use their waitlist. There are some very high-ranked schools, very selective schools, that say, "We are intentionally going to waitlist a certain number of people with the expectation that we're going to admit 10 to 15 to 20% of our class from the waitlist," and they're doing that because it makes their job easier. They're doing that so they can dial in on their medians and dial in on getting exactly the right number of people in their class, even though they're a very selective school and their yield is very high, and they can make all kinds of other expectations about their class. So, I'd fundamentally be optimistic about your chances of being admitted off the waitlist—just for anyone.
Nathan: You really want to let the school give you the decision. Don't be the one that preemptively takes yourself out of consideration. Especially if it's a program that you feel very strongly about, because there is opportunity from the waitlist. There is opportunity to find an offer of admission. You just have to manage the process.
Anna: Yeah, it certainly can be a tricky process. The only thing I will add to that is that is, in general—in the broadest possible terms—the longer that you stay on a waitlist, probably the higher your chances are. Now, that very, very much depends on a lot of factors, but in, again, those broadest possible terms, first of all, there's the fact that as you go further and further into the waitlist process, more and more people are probably going to be dropping off the waitlist, so then you're just in a smaller pool, which is helpful for you. And then there's also the notion of "summer melting," which we haven't really talked about in this episode. But the notion of, if a school that is super selective admits some people off of their waitlist, those people are probably already deposited at another law school, so if they decide, "Okay, I'm going to go to this law school where I was just admitted off of the waitlist," that opens up a spot at that other law school where they were deposited. So then that school then goes to their waitlist and they admit some people to fill those spots. Those people then withdraw from the schools where they had been previously deposited, on and on, etc. etc. So that sort of summer melting in the waitlist process can really increase your chances over time.
Now that said, as we've been talking about, this varies a great deal from school to school. We could not possibly give any sort of accurate, like, "Oh you have this percentage chance," or "You have approximately this range," even, "of percentage chances from the waitlist. It depends on the school, it depends on the individual applicant, and it depends a great deal on just how their deposits come out, and who decides to deposit at a given law school. So, even if you asked the specific admissions officer who decided on your waitlist, who decided to give you a waitlist, "What are my chances off the waitlist?" they could not even tell you accurately, even if they wanted to be completely transparent about the process, because it's going to depend on how their deposits come back and how things move throughout the summer.
Let's end with final sort of parting pieces of advice. For people who are listening to this podcast, they probably have received at least one waitlist, they're probably looking to pursue those waitlists. What last piece of advice do you want to leave them with?
Nathan: It's a marathon, not a sprint. Be prepared to have the mental endurance to make it through the summer. Certainly, a great outcome could happen and wrap it up nice and quickly, but be prepared for it to be a long grind. It’s okay that it's a long grind. It'll be frustrating, it will be vexing, but at the end of the day, it's about being able to handle that endurance to continue that drum of outreach and kind of constant rhythm of outreach to ensure that you're doing what you need to do to get into that dream program.
Joe: I would say that, I love waitlist candidates. There is a soft place in my heart for people who want to be admitted off the waitlist. They are often the people who really, really, really want to go to a particular school. They usually turn into great students at a particular school. I was something of a waitlist specialist when I was in the admissions office, but I have to admit that I did not have the guts to go through the waitlist process when I was applying to law school. I just said, no way, I can't handle this, I’m not doing it. Now, that was a different time and place, but I really admire the people who go through the process because they really do want to attend that school.
And I also have to say that I’ve been in the world of admissions for over a decade, between being in the admissions office and being a consultant. And there's lots and lots of candidates who I've seen be admitted. The ones who stick out in my mind, who I still remember, were often the last or the second-to-last person who we admitted off the waitlist. And we admitted them because we saw something in their application that we thought was going to make them really successful and really great. And we were right. They admit people because they think that they’re going to succeed. So even if you end up being the last person admitted to your class, you’re going to do great. The admissions office admitted you because they think that you have the chance to do good things, and they are usually right. That person is maybe not the very top valedictorian of the class, maybe not, but they’re usually not at the bottom of the class either. They’re usually somebody who ends up being very successful. You should take that forward and feel like the world is your oyster and you can do everything.
Anna: I think that's a wonderful place to end. And actually, on that note, I think we're also going to link probably our podcast episode with Justin Ishbia, who Mike Spivey admitted as the last person off of the waitlist at Vanderbilt, and he had an LSAT score that was way below the median. He ended up knocking it out of the park in law school, being hugely successful afterward, and becoming a major donor of Vanderbilt Law School. Clearly, they made the right decision in admitting him. And if you get in off a waitlist, they made the right decision in admitting you, too.
Thank you to our listeners, and thank you both for joining me for this episode. I think it was very valuable. If you found this helpful, we'll be posting more about the waitlist and more about law school admission strategy generally throughout the rest of this cycle, and I hope we see you next time.