This blog post comes from our consultant Danielle Early. You can read her full bio at the end of this post.
You submitted your application months ago—last year, in fact! You’ve heard about other applicants getting admitted, some who may have applied later than you did… so why haven’t you heard yet? Is it a bad sign?
Every cycle, we hear these concerns from applicants, but please rest assured that the majority of admit offers come out after the new year. Admissions officers are settling into a winter of reading, and the file review process is really just beginning to get into full swing for most of them. They expect to find incredible candidates throughout their reading period—in October and in March. And a lot of times, they have read an application and marked it to be returned to later in the cycle when they have a better sense of the applicant pool (check out this blog for some of the reasons that might happen). So if you haven’t heard yet, consider no news to be good news, as your decision is still waiting to be made.
For a small portion of the applicant pool, that reassurance is enough. But most of you are looking for facts and details of when you’ll hear—so our team has gathered some data for you. We reviewed data from our clients’ results supplemented with data from online sources for last year’s admission cycle. Two important caveats: first, we present the information below with the recognition that not all applicants report their results; however, enough do that we can reliably believe the trends we are seeing when they align with our internal, verified data. Second, though we feel good about the significance of the findings below, they are by necessity based on last cycle, and any given school may change their practices from year to year.
Law School Admissions Timing Data
- Last year, only about 30% of all offers of admission happened by the end of the calendar year, which means 70% were sent out after January 1st. In general, higher-ranked schools had offered fewer admits by the new year than lower-ranked schools:
- 34% for T-100
- 30% for T-50
- 20% for T-14 (I often say the more you want to go to a school the longer you are likely to wait for their answer!)
- January and February were the most active admission months with around 20% of the admits for the cycle coming out each of those months.
- March and April were still quite active, with 15% of all admits for the cycle in March and 7% in April.
- While many waitlists and denials do come out in the fall and early winter, most of these decisions come after January, with over 50% being sent out in March and April.
Now, it’s important to note that this is looking at decisions across all schools, but the pace at each school will vary. In recent years, UVA and Michigan tend to be the earliest of the T-14 to admit applicants, though both still admit through spring. While last year, the T-14 had 20% of their admits reported by January 1st, Harvard Law had not yet admitted anyone. (They are incredibly transparent about their admit timing and put out (a) blog(s) each year with the dates that they expect to send admits and typically do not veer from that.) Other schools appear to have sent the bulk of their admit decisions in January, like UCLA, or in February, like UChicago. Meanwhile Stanford appeared to have sent most of their admissions in March and April. Each school’s timeline will be what works best for them, so I encourage you not to make assumptions about any school based on communication from another. Additionally, again, this is all based on last year’s data, and even schools that may have had fairly consistent timelines in years past may implement changes in the future. We are not able to make any assertions as to what timelines individual schools are planning for this current cycle.
So, if more than ⅔ of admit offers have yet to be sent, (¾ of the T-14!), I think it’s fair to say, “No, it’s not a bad sign if you haven’t heard yet! In fact, it’s quite normal.”
Danielle Early has 15 years of admissions experience, most recently serving as Associate Director of Admissions at Harvard Law School. As a voting member of the HLS admissions committee, she evaluated over 10,000 applications and conducted hundreds of admissions interviews. Prior to HLS, Danielle worked in undergraduate admissions at Harvard College as well as Clark University.