[0:17] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Hello, and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, and a little bit of everything. I’m Anna Hicks-Jaco, Spivey Consulting’s president, and today we are so fortunate to be joined by Natalie Blazer, the Dean of Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer at UVA Law, and she’s been in that position for I believe six cycles now, going on seven.
The first part of this episode is hosted by Mike Spivey, and that part was really focused on: what happened to this cycle, and what do we anticipate for the 2026-2027 cycle? I think one of the longer-term trends in admissions has been that it’s getting less and less predictable, and I mean that across individual applicant outcomes, what schools are expecting in terms of the applicant pool, broader factors that impact admissions—and that has been self-perpetuating to some extent, that unpredictability, but Mike also gives his best stab at a prediction for how applicant volume will ultimately shake out this cycle. He and Dean Blazer also give their best two pieces of admissions advice, and I add one in there too.
Then we’ll jump to part two of this episode, and I’ll be hosting that part, which is taking questions from Reddit. We didn’t have time for all of them, but we got to as many as we could. We talked about why UVA’s LSAT and GPA stats stayed pretty much flat this fall versus last fall, and how admissions officers look at the hard stats versus the soft factors that surround and contextualize an applicant’s numbers. We talked about how admissions officers are taking into account the truly terrible job market that new college grads are facing right now and how that impacts how they look at resume gaps. We talked about the hot-button question of: Is it a red flag to retake a 173 or 174? We talked about tips for reapplying to UVA Law, and we talked about Dean Blazer’s favorite quote-unquote “soft factors.” So let’s jump in. Mike first, and then you’ll hear from me a little bit more later.
Mike Spivey: Hi, Dean Blazer. It’s good to be with you and Anna. Hi, Anna.
Natalie Blazer: Hello, thank you for having me. Nice to see you guys again.
Mike: I’m going to dive into the genesis of this podcast and time together, if you don’t mind.
Natalie: Please.
Mike: About four months ago, people in admissions were texting me, “Hey, odd things are going on this cycle,” and of course, we saw them too, and applicants saw them. And then about three months ago, Dean Blazer, you texted me. I’ll never forget this text, because you nailed it. “You don’t strike me as the cussing type, but you should do a podcast, ‘What the F happened this cycle?’ Then, of course, I couldn’t stop thinking on it, and then, I think a month after that, I was like, “Hey, do you want to do this podcast?” Right? So we figured we’d start on there and then move forward.
Natalie: That sounds great, and yes. I am the cussing type outside of work. I sent you that text because right around three months ago was when I was feeling challenged by the 2026 cycle and confused. And we ended up yielding a great class, of course, but just some odd things were happening.
And I always find your podcast to be a source of very good, helpful information, so I don’t know how much I personally can contribute to understanding the last cycle, but I’m happy to just actually be chatting about it, because, like you said, I can’t be the only one who felt that way.
[3:18] Mike: Well, you mentioned “confusing.” What were some of the confusing behaviors that were going on?
Natalie: What was confusing for me was some external things to UVA. Like, we still got great applicants. We still had a great experience with the people we admitted and all of that. But I think we were finding that other schools were admitting at a different pace than they typically did, or they were making scholarship offers that were unusual, or somebody would have committed to us, but then a school that they withdrew from suddenly said, “Oh, hey, like, we’ll double your scholarship.” Just things that struck me as outside of the norm, when what other schools do with folks that we have admitted in common impacts us.
So I think the applicant pool was there and was strong. That was all good, and I think we went about our business as usual, but it was really in the springtime when we were seeing this unusual behavior, which did lead us to go to quite a heavy waitlist season.
Mike: Right. So is it fair to say, from your perspective, the cycle started off stronger and higher in volume than anticipated?
Natalie: I think that is right, and it leveled off for us. And by the way, I should say, when I was first starting in law school admissions, I had one view of doing waitlists, and now, after 11 years, I have a much different view. The view is, I actually love waitlists. I say this all the time. Two years ago, the number one GPA in the class that graduated was from the waitlist. Waitlist does not mean anything about the caliber of the applicant.
So for us, it is exciting to get to do a waitlist, because those are people maybe who really do want to be somewhere. But it does make the cycle quite long. It means that we were admitting about three months longer than we’re used to.
Mike: If you want a great waitlist story, one of my first years in admissions, the last person I took off the waitlist—he’s been on our podcast. His name is Justin Ishbia. He’s a billionaire who owns two professional sports teams.
Natalie: I heard him on your podcast, I think. In admissions, we could take a class four times over from our applicants. The people who we admitted in the first round, did they come here, or did they go somewhere else. And this year, a lot of people went somewhere else, again, due to what I saw as some unusual external market behavior.
Mike: Right. Okay, so last cycle, what we have is we have this sky-high, front-loaded applicant volume. And it could have been higher, but my memory is up 33%. Of course, applicants don’t know because they’ve only done this once. The institutional memory for an applicant is one year, so they see 33% and understandably say, “Oh my God, this cycle is going to be 33% up.” The previous cycle had been 18.6% up, so we knew it was going to come down.
So we started, in partnership with someone, looking at advanced data analysis of what would happen based on previous cycles in the current cycle, and time-smoothing data analysis. And even with those models, we had it coming down to 20%, 18%. Ended up at 7.9%.
So one of the things that happened last cycle is you had this long glide path of fewer and fewer applicants from this high number. I think what happened is schools put a lot of people on the waitlist and then couldn’t touch them for a while, unlike previous cycles, because that high number was coming down, down, down, and when that happens, you get nervous about being over-enrolled, over-committed.
[6:48] Natalie: Yes. I think that is definitely part of it. We at UVA, we rely on a lot of data. We’re a very data-driven admissions process, and whenever the applicant pool seems very rich, we do tend to admit conservatively. So when I say we had a really big waitlist season—I mean not “really big”; we admitted more from the waitlist than is typical; it’s still a relatively small number—but we had under-admitted as well. The people we admitted ended up going elsewhere, even after sometimes they were committed to us, but we had also admitted conservatively from the beginning.
Mike: Right.
Natalie: And the reason we did that is exactly what you said. When it seems like apps are, like, flying at you, you’re like, “Well, wait a second. I better wait and see who’s coming down the pike,” and you just try to take it a little bit slower. So I think that definitely conspired.
And I know we’re going to talk about this, or maybe we are. The changes in the loan landscape, I think, has something to do with the admit behavior, possibly on the applicant side, too. Whether so many people were applying, I don’t know how they viewed coming into the cycle knowing that they would most likely have to take out private loans, but I do think it changed their calculus when it came to deciding among schools.
Mike: You would think that it changed both applicant behavior and admissions decision-making behavior, even more so this cycle as things pick up. Because I remember being at AALS speaking with deans, and talking with deans ranked, like, 50 to 100, and I remember saying, “This is your time.” If I were to be a dean of a law school, I would love to be at the 55th-ranked school because, I can beat the 30th-ranked school unlike ever before—and this obviously trickles up and down; it doesn’t have to be 50 versus 30—because students are now much more debt-averse because they can’t get the full loan, and they have to go to private loans. So if you can have this person come to your school with no debt, or $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 debt, versus schools 20 ahead of you, now is the time you can capture. And I think this is actually going to intensify. What are your thoughts on that?
Natalie: Right. So it’s either your school has much lower tuition, or you’re able to provide scholarship dollars that higher-ranked schools just aren’t going to provide to that particular candidate.
Mike: You’ve heard me say this before: prediction is difficult, especially when it involves the future. So it may be that you have more people turning down higher-ranked schools for more money. You may have had a little bit of that last year. We had anecdotal evidence that happened, but we don’t have hard data.
Natalie: Well, and look, we’re UVA Law; I know we’re in a very nice position and we’re a great school, but people turn down our full rides to go somewhere else for sticker. Every individual has their own financial situation, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that even the people who say they’re the most debt-averse and they’re going to go where they get the most scholarship, it’s not really true. So I will be curious to see how the finances impact this cycle.
Mike: Well, there’s someone on our podcast right now who did go to UVA for a full ride.
Natalie: Hey, Anna.
Anna: I have to say, negotiations-wise this is useless to you now, but I would’ve gone to UVA for a lot less money probably.
Natalie: Knew it! No. [laughs]
Anna: [laughs]
[10:02] Mike: We can draw you back in soon on it, and you can give some anecdotes if you want. The third variable that is worth mentioning. I actually don’t know if this is good or bad because it cuts both ways, but for almost many years now, you see the LSAT bell curve slowly moving to the right. 150 used to be the midpoint, and, you know, it’s been moving to the right. But over the last two cycles, what you’ve seen is not only is it shifting to the right, but that far right side is now lumpy. I guess it’s a curve, but if it’s a curve, it’s a curve that has a huge lump at the right.
Now, on the one hand, it sucks if you get a 172, and the school’s median is a 173, and five years ago, you’re looking at the data, and you’re like, this school’s median was a 169. Someone said on Reddit, “I should have applied when I was in middle school,” to law school, which is a great comment.
On the other hand, and tell me if I’m wrong, this would be called market segmentation. If schools 165 to 180 are now being flooded with enough high scorers, does that avail you the opportunity to read a word I didn’t use to use and now I do, to read files and applications and do interviews more holistically?
Natalie: Actually, this question really lends itself to the yes-and-no answer. And that is because, yes, because more people have high LSAT, high GPA. So that necessarily means that we need to look beyond the numbers to decide who among those high scorers we’re going to take. When I started in law school admissions at Columbia, I remember when I saw someone in my queue with a 175/4.0; I got very excited, and I knew I had a big fish, so to speak.
Now Columbia gets a lot of great applicants. I might have said this on your podcast before. With a 175/4.0, I knew pretty much before I even opened that e-app, before I even opened the CAS, that this was going to be a stellar applicant. The letters were going to be strong, the writing was going to be strong, the resume would be great. The correlation back then was higher, and so that excitement would build when we saw those numbers. That’s gone, because everybody has those numbers—and I hate to say that, I hate to say that, because some people, some of your listeners are like, “I don’t. I have a 3.5/165”—and like, yes, we have to read the higher numbers more holistically. So it’s just not enough anymore to have those.
Then on the flip side, what you said, Mike, about the Reddit person wanting to apply in middle school, yes and no to that too. Because the percentile of the LSAT scores has changed, which I know you know. I don’t necessarily want to have a 173 median, but that’s the percentile that we’ve had the last ten years, because the percentile of a 170 ten years ago is the percentile of a 173 today. People I don’t think realize that. You could talk about LSAC all day long, but the LSAT, the test scores keep going up, but the percentiles are changing. So the numbers just mean less than they used to. So, to the extent that that means we need to read much more holistically, we do. And the people with the 165/3.5, those are still great applicants, but you also have to know a 165 is in a different percentile—as is the GPA. Grade inflation is real. So that person could be a great applicant, but it’s always, “As compared to whom?” And that’s where the issue lies.
[13:31] Mike: Yeah, I was trying to explain this to two people, I won’t name them, but think high-level higher education leaders. LSAC is trying hard. They’re in person. They have some issues to fix. I think they underestimated how much of an impact removing logic games—they had backward-looking data when they did a study of what removing logic games would do, but they didn’t have any forward-looking data. It was kind of a guess that they got wrong. They’re trying hard. I’m optimistic that they’re going to help normalize the scoring. And I was trying to explain this. Tell me if I’m right or wrong. If I’m a school, I actually want the LSAT scores at the top to slide back down, but I want mine to slide down not as much as the others. You get more differentiation. And then you can still be a winner if you go from 173 to 172 if everyone else is going from 173 to 171. That’s kind of, like, the ideal scenario for the market, and then if you’re a school, if you can not slide down as rapidly as the others. I actually think that’s going to happen. I think there is going to be some sliding backward.
Natalie: I would love nothing more than for LSAT scores to come back down to earth. It would feel more real to me, feel more realistic. And like, I can’t help but think of the hiring market, which I know y’all have talked about on your podcast too. Like, every firm wants to go back to the way it was, but nobody can, because they don’t want to miss out on the greatest 1L law students, so they say, “Fine, I’m going to do it October 1st.”
That’s how we thought. I don’t want to go up on the medians, but the other schools—it’s like a prisoner’s dilemma. Like, we all kind of want the same things, but we can’t be the only ones who are suddenly sliding down, because if the LSAT percentiles that are out there don’t support that, then you could make the argument that we’re getting weaker candidates.
Mike: Right, and prisoner’s dilemma is a great example. 1 out of every 25 people who listen to this will do antitrust law. It’s not like you can get together and say, “Hey, let’s all drop our medians.” You have to be in the arena like everyone else.
It’s a good way to shift toward forward-looking, because we kind of already talked on this. For this coming cycle, you actually have—you have real data. You don’t have to give it, of course. I think the LSAC volume summary report will populate late September.
If I had to guess, my guess would be we start off high. You can’t start off overly high, because if it was up 33% last year, and last year was falling at 18.6%—at some point, the math just stops mathing, right? And so I do think we’ll be front-loaded, because I think people probably jumped in on the June LSAT being the last remote. So you’ll have some of those people. You’ll have a lot of reapplicants, because last year was a brutally competitive cycle. And then things tend to front-load more and more and more because people just have this notion that they get this mythical bump if they submit their application in September versus October, when I don’t see anything to back that notion, but still people like thinking that, “If I submit it in September, I get an advantage over someone in October.” So you see more front-loading.
So I do think we’ll start off a little bit up, 20%. I think we’re going to end +1 to +5% up because, again, the data—at some point, there’s just not enough people to support growing numbers five cycles in a row. Last cycle was the highest point of applicants since 2010. I’m curious your thoughts on that.
Natalie: And I saw something similar. Like, if you look at just people who are registered for the LSAT, which we know doesn’t necessarily always translate to they’re going to apply to law school, but, like, those registrations, even though we’re going back to in-person, those have not dropped off. Those continue to rise. If you think to yourself, the more people signed up for the LSAT, the more applicants we’re going to see, I see it as being similar to last cycle, if not slightly up.
As of today, we have almost exactly the same number of applicants we did this day last year. So, like, I don’t think we’re going to be up hugely in applicants. I think we are going to be similar to where we were last year, but like you said, it’s very early.
I think the advantage that people who apply in September get is they just hear so much sooner, at least from us. If they are strong and they’re going to be admitted, they hear so much sooner. Two weeks ago, our application opened, and if you’re somebody who applies on the day it opens and we like you, we’re going for it. That’s just because we have so fewer other apps to read. They start piling up and piling up and piling up, and so it’s just harder to get back to people sooner. You’re exactly right, Mike, that it doesn’t mean your application can be worse. It just means you might hear back sooner.
Mike: Yeah, I would, just to put a huge asterisk by that: apply in September if your application is strong for the schools you’re applying to. There’s no reason to wait, of course. I can’t stress this enough, if you can make your application better with a new LSAT, with taking two more weeks, a month to write, to hammer it out and perfect this thing, that extra four weeks for the better LSAT score or the perfected application, much better than rushing.
Natalie: Yes. 1,000%.
[18:17] Mike: Right. This cycle is going to be slow for applicants. There’s just no way around it. There’s too much confusion in the market.
Natalie: Yeah, it’s so funny because when I welcomed the 1L class on August 14th, I said, “Good morning. I’m so happy you’re here. This was a long cycle.” I was just kind of getting my intro in, and, like, the whole room laughed. And I’m thinking like, “Okay.” That told me that they really felt, and I had heard that from people, but the whole room laughed like, “Yeah.”
So last cycle was really long, not just from my perspective, but from theirs. As far as it being slow, yeah, I think a lot of things are converging to make that the case. We can talk about more specifics if you want.
Mike: I’m going to hand it over to Anna soon to do the micro-level drilling down. But at the macro level, there’s just so much uncertainty. How much cheating occurred, and if it was not negligible—because no one knows how much cheating occurred. We know there was cheating. Was it 100 people or 3,000? I could have, from Colorado, gone in through RedNote, followed the link, and bought the cheating courses. So this notion of finger-pointing towards Asia and saying it’s all them, probably not. That’s still a little bit of a pebble in my shoe, to point in one direction when we know it could be occurring in any nation on the planet.
So we don’t know, and we’ll never know. I can guarantee you LSAC didn’t engage with a law firm to uncover how much cheating was going on. You would do a forensic accounting firm. They engaged with a law firm to bury the story, which, to their credit, they’re burying. They went in person. So we don’t know how much that’ll impact. We don’t know how much they’re going to get a handle on in-person issues versus remote issues. So there’s just so much uncertainty.
I could go on with the uncertainty. The demographic cliff, the application count, applicant count, LSAT inflation. All of these are uncertainties, which lead for a slow decision-rendering process.
Natalie: Agreed. I’m the last person who wants to believe there was cheating on the LSAT. I just don’t want to believe it. Same thing, I don’t want to believe that people are using AI to write all their essays. I don’t want to believe that. But you know, I live in the real world too. So, like, I think for both of the reasons—cheating, the AI, all of it—it does make us more careful when we’re reading applications. We’re not just looking at your high LSAT score. We’re looking if you had a huge jump that’s unexplained. We’re not just looking at your transcript; we’re looking at what your letter writers say, what your essays say.
And so that takes time. If you actually really care about who you’re admitting and whether they are who they say they are, that takes time. And we’re going to interview, as we always do, but what happens is, the more that applications, inflated applications come in, sometimes that means the admit-to-interview rate is not what we would want it to be either, and that takes time. Interviewing takes a ton of time, and especially when we’re not admitting all the people we’re interviewing, that’s more time invested.
And so I think it’s worth it, and we were admitting through mid-June, and that was long, but it’s so worth it. It’s so worth it to get the class that we want to get.
Mike: Yeah. The more people use AI, the more interviews take importance. The more you start flagging, “This essay looks suspicious,” the more you’re going to drill them in interviews. Even at our firm, when we interview people now, we ask much harder questions than we did two years ago.
Natalie: Yeah.
Mike: We want to get a feel for if they’re editing based off of AI or if they have a feel for admissions, etc. We talked to you about admissions consulting three years ago, and that conversation was very pleasant. I’d be hammering you with difficult questions now, Natalie.
Natalie: [laughs]
[21:52] Mike: I’m kidding. Switching gears, I gave a top five countdown on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, the five biggest mistakes applicants can make. My second biggest was speaking to a committee versus speaking for yourself, because that takes away the authenticity. When people start—I always use these words—when people start dropping “bumptious,” “bloviating,” overwrought language, right? I use those words because you would never use those words in a sentence.
From our side of things, we get to see them write in real time. As much as we warn them about this, a pretty high percentage, at some point during the first few months of working on their essays, they will lose track of that advice and start writing to impress someone they’ve never met. And that’s when we have to say, “Your writing is changing. You’re not being your authentic self.” So that was the second biggest mistake.
The first biggest mistake was: I love people who get really into this process. Anna got super into it when she applied. They speak my language. They ask great questions online, on social media, and on Reddit. And there’s something really good about being strategic at this stage in your life, because you’re going to have to be strategic professionally your entire life. We had Emmy-winning journalist Elizabeth Vargas on, and that was her biggest piece of advice was: be strategic.
But there is a point where this process can run away from you. You stop being a human on this planet living life, and you start being an applicant, and you’re checking your status checker 200 times a day. And those people, incidentally, Natalie, not only is that mentally unhealthy, but my experience has been they have worse outcomes.
Natalie: Yeah. I totally echo what you just said. And, like, the applicants that tend to be the strongest from my perspective is the ones who truly know themselves. That’s hard advice to give, like, “Know yourself better!” But if you really know yourself, the authenticity just comes. You don’t feel pressure to change what you’re saying or to conform to what an admissions committee wants, because you know yourself, and you know what you’re getting into. You have a purpose.
And to the point about being strategic but not letting it overtake your life, if you really know yourself, that to me says you know your inherent value and worth that exists outside of this process, and so you’re not checking your status checker 200 times. You know that you will get into a great law school, or you won’t, and you might have to make a life pivot, and you’ll be okay with that too.
I can almost hear my 22-year-old self hearing this and being like, “I don’t, like, how do I do that?” It’s kind of like you know it when you see it. And I would say if you’re struggling with the personal statement or with why you want to go to a school, with the “Why X” statement, that’s okay. It might just mean that you need more time. You just might need more time before you jump into this application process. And if you feel like you’re going to be compelled to check a million times, you might need more time. Because those, I would say neurotic behaviors—and I identify as someone who’s extremely neurotic, so I don’t think neuroses are a bad thing—that’s not going to serve you in law school or in the legal profession. So I do think there needs to be a little bit more of a self-awareness, self-assuredness, and maturity that might come with time.
Mike: Right. Any others? One more piece of advice for applicants?
[25:02] Natalie: Okay, so I say this sometimes, and I don’t know if people believe me—but I can tell by the way someone replies to an email when I ask them to interview how well the interview’s going to go. Emailing is an executive function. We actually have a technical standards committee here now, that if you don’t reply to emails from like faculty, staff, administration, you are in danger of not being in good standing.
And I think that that’s something that people don’t really think about. If I am taking the time to write to someone an email, I’m not using AI. I’m not using the online database to just send an automated email. I am sitting there and writing you a fresh email because I like your application. I want to interview you. And if you don’t reply in a timely manner, if you don’t use the correct title, if your availability is unreasonable, I know right away how the interview’s going to go.
Versus, on the flip side, 90% of people do a good job of replying, and then I get extra excited about the interview. And I think that this is—I don’t want to say this is a generational thing—but I think little things like the way you reply to emails and your timeliness in general, I see 1Ls here who have the professionalism and the punctuality, and I know they are going to be great. I know they are going to be great as lawyers, because a lot of lawyering depends on those skills.
And I just think you need to get in the habit of being on your A game when it comes to things like that. That, of course, translates to the entire application. I’ve said this on your podcast before: make it tight, make it well edited, all those things. But even when you’re corresponding with an admissions office, just keep those things in mind.
Mike: I could write a whole book, and I may someday when I retire, on how to email professionally. That’s how important it is, and that’s how many mistakes are made. I will do a podcast. You just gave me the idea. The emailing thing is—I talk so much about it.
I’m going to hand this over to Anna, and I’m going to put her on the spot and ask her for one of the biggest admissions mistakes that she sees in the process.
Anna: Thanks, Mike. Okay, I’m supposed to come up with my biggest mistake? Hmm, I did not think about that at all. In terms of what I’ve been seeing recently, I’m going to say that a big one that I see a lot is people who spend a lot of time really focused on the big components—and Natalie, this goes a great deal with what you were saying—but focus a lot on your personal statement, on your application components, the most important ones. And then I think sometimes it’s just, you’re so mentally exhausted from that. Sometimes I think it might just come from not necessarily being super detail-oriented as a person.
But I think oftentimes people can lose track of the fact that all of the little details count also. And not necessarily just one little detail; you know, if you leave one question blank in an application and the school wishes that you answered it, that’s probably not going to be the difference between an admit and a waitlist or the difference between a waitlist and a denial. But having all of those little details, all of the small things as buttoned up as you possibly can, does create an overall impression of a stronger application—
Natalie: Yes.
Anna: —and one that represents someone who’s likely to be a real professional in law school and as an attorney, as you were talking about, Natalie. Whereas someone who—it’s very clear, you know, I see all the time, like, people who just weren’t paying attention to those little details, and you can see that also just all over the application, and that also indicates something. So that will be mine, is pay attention to those little details.
Natalie: The small things are the big things. Details matter. This is the legal profession. I notice, and they matter. And so, yes, I could totally empathize with, there are so many moving pieces of this process. It’s long, it’s exhausting, it’s whatever. But it’s nothing compared to law school, it’s nothing compared to practicing law, and it’s so easy to make a great impression by having all those things, as you said, buttoned up.
Anna: Yeah. Okay, well, let’s jump into Reddit questions.
Natalie: Great.
[28:46] Anna: I’m going to start with, and we’ll try to get through as many of these as we can: “Why did UVA’s GPA and LSAT numbers stay virtually the same as last year’s, especially in light of theoretically more higher-stat applicants? And is there any desire to continue raising the school’s medians?”
Natalie: This is a great question. I’ll start by saying, in the applicant pool that we got, we could have gone up on both. We looked into the data. We could do it.
Anna: Yeah.
Natalie: But I will remind listeners that going up on medians is not my decision. I don’t know how savvy listeners are about that. It’s not my decision. There are a lot of people and things that play into that. It’s an entire law school. Yes, admissions is the one where people think of the medians, but there are just a lot of different factors that go into this.
Similar to what we were saying earlier, I would love to never go up again. I would love to go down. I would love to get rid of them altogether in some respects. But I see not going up this year as almost pumping the brakes on a downhill train. Our medians, in my opinion, are sky-high. We’re getting great people. It’s almost just like we’re holding the door against an angry mob. You’re like, “Can I just hold off one more year?” Because the reality is we are going to keep going up. Because, as I said earlier, other schools are going up. If you don’t go up, if you’re not progressing, you’re falling behind, or whatever the saying is.
In a year where we feel it is reasonable and prudent to hold the line, we will do that. That’s not unprecedented. We’ve done that in the past. Other schools have done that. If you look at just medians across the years, there’s no school that every single year goes up on both, at least not among our peers. You might go up on GPA but hold on LSAT. Whether it’s totally unprecedented among other schools to go up on both, I’m not sure, but I know at UVA we have done that before. We have held the line.
And the reality is—I know people don’t want to hear that—it’s because we’re going to keep going up. And there’s only so far to go, so it’s not an infinite ceiling on medians. If it were, maybe we would keep going up. But I think we know that we’re getting into even more compressed at the top. And so if we can still bring in a great class, and we can still get all the people that we want by spending one year holding the line, that’s what we decided to do.
Anna: Yeah. Thank you for that answer. And I think there’s a lot of insight in there that applicants don’t necessarily understand, especially as far as where these decisions come from, the sorts of input that is going into them, and the fact that it is not isolated within the person who’s reading the application and making this one specific decision on your application. And it has nothing to do with how they value, like, your specific LSAT score, right? I worked with a couple of people who got into UVA this cycle and are happily attending who had scores in the 160s, and they are incredibly intelligent, wonderful people, and I assume that’s why you admitted them.
Natalie: Absolutely.
Anna: All of that makes sense to me. And I agree people probably won’t love to hear that you anticipate medians continuing to go up, but I will just highlight what you said earlier, which I thought was such an obvious observation to some degree, but also something that I don’t think that people are really thinking about, which is just that: your LSAT score has not gone up in terms of the percentile among the larger pool of applicants. The concrete score itself has gone up, and LSAT scores altogether have gone up. Your GPAs have gone up, and GPAs altogether have gone up. So just wanted to flag that as well, if someone is listening to just this little clip.
Natalie: Yes. We are reflecting the pool, and the percentiles of LSATs and GPAs change as those become, I hate to say it, but devalued. The percentiles do change. And so, a 170 is not a bad LSAT score. It is a phenomenal LSAT score. But it is the same percentile as what the 173 percentile is today. I know that that’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s not coming from us deeming what the good scores are.
[32:42] Anna: Yeah. Okay, let’s move on to: “Are admissions going to be taking into account the abysmal job market for fresh undergrads right now, where many post-bachelors might be unable to find full-time employment for 1 to 2+ years post-graduation?” And this person adds, “I have personally experienced sending probably easily 50+ online applications and have yet to find full-time work post-bachelor’s, resulting in having a resume gap and lacking direct employment experience.”
Natalie: Yeah, so first, my heart goes out to all the fresh grads, because I know that the market is really tough. And it’s not unrelated, maybe, to the fact that law school applications are going up.
Anna: For sure.
Natalie: Law school applications and the job market have always gone hand-in-hand, for better or for worse, okay? So this is not the first time that people have had a hard time with the job market and therefore turned to law school. And I’m not saying that that’s why this person is applying to law school.
So what I would say is, of course, we are aware. It’s similar to COVID, when a job abruptly went remote in March 2020. We are aware of what’s going on in the world, and we read all the resumes and applications as a whole in context of greater world events, so we are very aware.
I think what I care more about is, if you are in that position, aside from applying to jobs, what have you been doing with your time? I just would like to see somebody who’s resourceful and diligent and spending their time in a productive way while they are trying to find full-time work. Somebody who is not just saying, “Well, it’s a bad job market, so I have a two-year resume gap,” versus somebody who maybe is volunteering or something else to really use that time productively.
And I know that’s easier said than done to be applying for jobs. You never know when you might get a job, and so do you really want to invest your time in something else? But you just have to remember that you are an applicant among thousands, and if other people are similarly situated to you, what might they be doing with their time that is appealing and attractive to us? And know that you are always going to be compared to all the applicants around you who are in the same boat.
So, I think if you are somebody who has struggled to find full-time work, feel free to write an addendum about that. You can always explain more about your efforts. It’s going to demonstrate to us how you approach life, how you’re going to approach challenging circumstances in law school and in your legal practice, is how you are confronting this tough job market. What is your attitude like? Are you stuck in a victim mentality? Are you making the most of your time? This difficult job market can tell us a lot about you, if you are responding to it in a certain way and if you are demonstrating that to us through your application materials.
Anna: Thank you for that. I have a follow-up question that is not from Reddit. If you were looking at a couple of applicants who were very similar in most respects, one has this resume gap, and the other one has, similarly, no post-graduation professional work experience, nothing related to their major, nothing that requires a college degree, but they have something on there, you know, they are working some sort of job. How much value does that have versus a person who has a resume gap?
Natalie: Any work experience is going to be valuable, I think. That doesn’t mean that the person with work experience is automatically getting in over the person with the resume gap, depending on what all the other factors are, but any work experience these days is going to be important just because of the legal job market, the early hiring process, it’s getting earlier and earlier and earlier. And this is not my expertise, but I spend a lot of time talking to our Office of Career Development. Employers like seeing work experience. Legal employers do. They just do. And you can be KJD if you have summers, if you have internships, if you have experiences that make you more certain of your path and give you, frankly, I hate to put it this way, but more to talk about.
What can you talk about as far as what you want to do in terms of practicing law? I’m a KJD. I had many summer jobs, and oftentimes in the summers, I was doing something, quote-unquote, “professional,” like an internship, but I was also waiting tables or something like that to make the money. I was doing internships. I was exploring things during the school year as well. You can be KJD, and you can have, in my view, professional experience that’s going to contribute.
So having a resume gap, it is tough. Like I said, it all depends on what you’ve been doing and how you frame it. But more and more and more, some sort of work experience that is informing your next step—that doesn’t mean it’s legal-related, but it’s informing your next step, and it’s giving you something to talk about—is going to be important.
[37:33] Anna: Yeah, that’s something that I’ve heard from a lot of folks who are more on the employment side of things is that notion of, “What are we going to talk about if it’s this person who has truly no experience?” And this is not characterizing that particular commenter at all; they might have great internships and lots of things to talk about with employers. But with someone who really lacks that experience, it’s the question of, “Are we just going to talk about their college clubs and the classes that they took, or what are we going to have to talk about?” I think that’s a very real thing that employers and that interviewers are thinking about.
Okay, so this next question from Reddit is a hot topic that I’ve seen being discussed, so let’s get your take. “Is retaking after scoring a 173 or a 174 a red flag? Is there ever a benefit to scoring higher than the school’s median, at UVA especially, when a candidate has a score that’s already at or above it? And if so, is there a specific score at which those benefits diminish?”
Natalie: I think this is rightfully a hot topic, actually, because if you got a 173, which again, we can all agree is a phenomenal score, and you retake it, are you being, as we talked about earlier, strategic because you are assuming schools’ medians are going to go up? That could be the school’s median this year, but is it going to be next year? I could see somebody retaking as being strategic if they want the best possible chance they can at that particular school.
So, I would say it used to be a red flag, because the LSAT was different in terms of how often you would see certain scores. I would say it used to be a red flag, maybe not so much anymore. Maybe if you already had a median that was good for every single school except for, like, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, if you retook it, it makes me think that you’re targeting those schools. But again, like, we’re all so compressed now that I don’t even think that I would think of it that way anymore.
What I will say, this might be a case where I would find a really quick addendum helpful just to say, “UVA is my dream school, and I know that it is so competitive now, and the medians keep going up, and I already got what I considered a great score, and I took it again just to improve my chances.” Something like that. If that is authentic and genuine to why you did it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t send an addendum.
But what I do want to say about the second part of your question—is being above the median to your advantage versus being at the median? Not really.
Anna: While taking into account targets.
Natalie: Especially if you’ve taken it multiple times. So if you took it 10 times to get a 180, and the other person took it once to get the median, let’s use our median from this past year, 173. I’m going with the one-time 173 every day of the week, and that’s because you’re at our median. You don’t get bonus points for being above, especially if you took it multiple times to get above. And why do I say that? Let’s put aside cheating. Let’s put aside anything that could make you have a great LSAT score other than your own raw intelligence and preparation. I do think there is a difference between taking it once to get a score and taking it five or six or seven times to get the same score.
Hopefully, if you did take the LSAT seven times, you would get better. But somebody taking it just once and nailing it, that shows to me focus, concentration. They got in, they got out, they did it. I’ve said this a hundred times, and I’ll say it again. You only get to take your contracts exam once. You don’t get to take it five times to get the grade you want. Same thing with oral argument in court. Same thing with a deposition. These things, I think it’s really good to get into the mindset of going in focused.
And so, you can have a bad test day. Of course, you can take it multiple times and improve. That’s why the whole system has changed, that we take your highest score. But if you’re already at a school’s median, being two or three points above it, it’s not really going to make a difference, in my view, at least for UVA. It’s not like we’re going to say, “Oh, man, this person is even more brilliant than all the people at our median, so we’re going to give them more scholarship money or something.” It doesn’t really work that way. Same thing with GPA, by the way. If you’re at the school’s median, being a couple hundredths of a point above, it’s not going to make a difference.
[41:47] Anna: Yeah, I think some of the misconceptions here come from a misunderstanding of the hard factors of admission and what those stats mean on a very statistical, data level, versus the soft factors that surround those numbers. So there’s the hard factors in terms of, are you going to increase our median, or keep our median the same, or are you bring our median down by admitting you? And that is the case regardless of how many times you’ve retaken, regardless of what your transcript looks like for your GPA, regardless of any of that—and that does have an impact. I don’t think anybody honestly in admissions would say that that does not have an impact.
But then there are also all of those soft factors, which are sort of in a different category. What does your transcript look like? Did you earn that 4.0 GPA with all classes that look like you took them because they sounded fun and easy, or were you challenging yourself? Did you take that test once, or did you take that test five times? And all of those things are also taken into account in that soft-factor way.
Natalie: You just nailed it, Anna, because LSAT and GPA matter for the hard reasons you said. They’re the hard factors. But then people also think they tell the admissions committee how, quote-unquote, “smart I am,” or “how hardworking I am.” And that’s why the GPA with the fluffy classes no longer tells us how hardworking you are. And the LSAT 10 times to get a 175 no longer tells us how smart you are.
That’s why we are always looking—I instruct my file readers: I want in your summary at the very top: what’s the grade inflation in that program? How many times did you take the LSAT? I want to know that right away, because it helps put it into context. And I hope that that’s helpful for people to hear who have lower LSATs but only took it once, or who have lower GPAs but go to a school with less grade inflation. We are looking at every metric in context.
I want applicants just, in any cycle, to be prepared for a school’s medians to go up. We’re recording this on September 14. Regardless of what any school plans to do, is being strategic about, you don’t know until the end of the cycle if you’re going to be able to achieve that. So, like, schools can have ideas. Schools can have goals. I have thought to myself, “We stayed the same this year. Does that mean we’re going to go up next year?” I don’t even know that yet. I want to make that clear for applicants.
Every school is always anticipating going up or staying the same. The applicants should know that, and I’m very comfortable saying that, because people see that borne out every single year in the class profiles. Schools don’t know whether they’re going to be able to achieve that, though, until the end, until it’s all said and done, until the class is physically in the building. And depending on how much they have worked those medians or how thick their cushions are, they could think they’ve achieved it and then they didn’t. So I want applicants to always be prepared that schools are at least thinking about going up, but knowing that that is going to really depend on the applicant pool.
And one major X factor that we talked about earlier is, what if the in-person LSAT really changes the score distribution? Schools that are thinking of going up, maybe that’s not going to be borne out in the pool. And as we’ve said multiple times on this podcast, we are responding and reacting to the pool. So even if any individual school has plans to go up or just is thinking, “We should be keeping pace with our peers and going up,” we don’t actually know if we can do that, especially not September 14. But even in April, we don’t know if that’s going to happen.
And by the way, you never know what the school’s medians are going to be for that incoming class. You can do your best to gauge based on what it has been for the last few years. I think it’s very good to be strategic, to have schools where you think you have a good shot. You know, all those things you tell people. And just be prepared that, A, having the medians of any given year is no guarantee, because they could go up. And even if they don’t go up, there are so many other things going into this that, like, you can’t just say, “Well, I have the school’s median, and therefore this is going to happen.”
[45:58] Anna: Yeah, I think this is such an important part of this conversation to have, especially in light of people using things like predictor websites, which obviously are based on past data. It cannot be based on future data. As you were saying, even the dean of admissions does not know whether you’re going to be able to go up and by how many points you’re going to be able to go up, if you are, next fall.
So those are taking all of this historical data. Meanwhile, we have a huge number of schools, way more than I expected, who went up two points this cycle. We have a number of schools who went up three points this cycle for their LSAT median. The results from last cycle truly do not mean that you are going to get similar results this cycle. So I want to put that caveat out there, especially when we are in this phase where law schools are going up with their stats, by and large, on average, every year. Be aware that those predictor-type websites are always going to have that significant handicap of, they are looking at only past data.
Natalie: That’s a great point to make.
Anna: Okay, I think we have time for a couple more questions, so let’s try to get to them. I thought this was a good one. “How can a student navigate reapplying to UVA Law?” And we just did a whole episode about this, about reapplying, so I’m very curious to hear your insights and input here.
Natalie: Yeah, so for folks who don’t know, I also have a podcast called Admissible, and I’m going to answer the question, but I also would be totally remiss if I didn’t point out that one of my all-time favorite episodes ever was with a reapplicant who is now a 3L at UVA Law, and he is an incredible human who had a great app to begin with, that was on the waitlist until the very, very, very end and was ultimately unsuccessful, and then he reapplied and obviously was admitted. And I invited him on the podcast because I felt he did everything right, and already had a strong app. I also love to use him as an example because his numbers did not change. And I think that people always assume you have to have a higher LSAT score or whatever. And so I really encourage people to just listen to that episode. His name is Tyler Stapleton, and so if you Google Admissible Tyler Stapleton, you’ll find it.
Anna: We’ll link it in the description also.
Natalie: Great, thank you.
It’s really about just knowing that there are more and more reapplicants in the pool every year, and so not to feel disadvantaged, but to really show us that you have been intentional with your reapplication. So you’ve got another letter. You reworked, maybe, one of your essays that wasn’t working so well. You applied earlier in the cycle. I know we have said that maybe that doesn’t necessarily improve your chances, but you’ve already gone through one cycle, so in theory, your materials should be—you’ve had more time to work on them, in theory, than a first-time applicant, so you could apply earlier in the cycle, again, theoretically. I see a lot of reapplicants applying binding when they didn’t the first time around. That just demonstrates to a school, “Hey, I’m still here, and I’m more determined than ever to get into UVA.”
I think one thing to know is we don’t expect your entire application to change from one year to the next. That would be odd. That would mean the first one was inauthentic or the second one was inauthentic. But there are ways to have some fresh eyes on it. Hopefully, you have done something with your time and life in the intervening year, or multiple years if you’re applying in a cycle a couple of years removed from your first cycle. What have you been doing during that time?
The best reapplicants, to me, have a clearer purpose for law school than they did the first time. And however they demonstrate that to us, that is actually what moves them over the line.
Anna: Super helpful. Thank you.
Okay, I think this is the last question we’ll have time for from Reddit. “What are some soft skills and volunteer or work experiences that you view especially favorably in the applications of competitive candidates?” So I like that last part of saying, these are not things that are going to bring you way up above the numbers, and, you know, you’re applying 15 points below the LSAT median but these will get you in—but if you’re already among that group of people who are competitive applicants, what are some softs that you think are especially strong?
[50:04] Natalie: I really like to see people who have evidence of hard work, in whatever that looks like. That could be someone who has been a caretaker for a family member. That could be somebody who navigated a super challenging Peace Corps assignment. That could be somebody who worked on a family farm and was up at dawn. That could be somebody who was in the military.
Look, law school is really hard work, and practicing law is really hard work. And there are a lot of different ways to slice hard work. Somebody who had to work a couple jobs during undergrad. I like to see people who have not shied away from that, either due to necessity or drive or whatever, because I just think the more I’m in this business, the more I see those are the people who do well here.
And at the end of the day, when you really zoom out of the admissions process, the application process, what do we actually care about? Getting admitted is not the end of your journey.
Anna: Yep.
Natalie: It’s the beginning of law school. You do not win because you got admitted. You are just now going to understand how difficult it is, how challenging it is, how, frankly, there can be some demoralizing moments in law school and legal practice that will all make you stronger, I promise. But like, when I see a resume or a personal statement, or I learn from the interview, or I learn from letters of recommendation, all of these life experiences the person’s had, whether it is, like I said, military, Peace Corps, caretaking, farm labor, whatever it is, however you’re presenting it to us—it’s not a sure thing or a guarantee, but that’s a really good indicator to me that you are going to do well in law school and beyond.
I will just close my thoughts on that with: I just came today from interviewing a 1L for my own podcast, for Admissible, and she is one month into 1L year. And I took a look at her class schedule, her doctrinals, to help her out with the scheduling of the podcast recording. Man, her schedule’s tough. She, like—and so I said to her when we were recording, I said, “Man, you have a tough schedule.” And this young woman graduated from West Point. She played a sport at West Point. And she kind of looked at me like, “Eh.” So, like, she was not at all flippant about it, but she was just like, “I’m used to getting up early. I’m used to having a schedule. I’m used to having it all locked in.” And look, she does. She has it dialed in.
Any indicators in the app that give me confidence about that, as far as you consider those “softs,” that’s great, and that’s what we’re looking for.
Anna: Yeah. I’ve heard admissions, law school admissions, referred to as “the pie-eating competition where the prize is more pie,” which I think is very apt in a lot of ways.
Natalie: Right.
Anna: You’re signing up for more hard work. You’re signing up for more waiting for test results anxiously that are going to have a huge impact on you.
Natalie: Yep. Yep.
Anna: All this good stuff.
Natalie: And look, I think you could be all the better for it, but you should know what you’re getting into for sure.
Anna: Yeah, definitely.
Well, thank you for taking this time. I know that your team is waiting for a meeting with you, so thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been incredibly valuable. Always great to have you on the podcast. And we will link Admissible in the description, so check out Natalie’s podcast as well!
Natalie: Thank you. Thank you so much, Anna and Mike. It’s a pleasure as always, and good luck to everybody this cycle who’s listening.
Anna: Thanks. Bye, everybody.
Natalie: Bye.
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