Waitlist Predictions for the 2024-2025 Law Scho...

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike discusses the various factors that are at play for this cycle's waitlist season, his predictions for how it will go, and his advice for waitlisted applicants. For more on waitlist strategy, check out our Waitlist Deep Dive podcast episode!

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.

Mike: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions—where we’re in today—a little bit of everything. I'm going to be talking about the waitlist, so we're fully in the law school admissions category of those three, which is where you want me to be, I think. Though, let me disclaim, I was just in a conference room all day yesterday with a current and many former admissions officers, deans of admissions—with well over 250 years' law school admissions experience—and the theme of the day is, none of us knows what's going to happen with the waitlist, because, quite frankly, no one knew what was going to come this year. The previous three or four years, we had been dead on in predicting what the percent increase or decrease in applications. We predicted a 12% increase, which was high, and I think people thought it was overly high. We predicted it because of the election year. Every four years, when there's a presidential election, there tends to be about a 5%, on average, increase. Because presidential candidate Harris was a former prosecutor who very much made that part of her campaign, because of things going on with presidential candidate and now-president Trump that sort of put the rule of law at the front, we had predicted 12%. I think where we really missed the boat was the entry-level also professional job market, what's called the great stay. People aren't leaving jobs, so jobs aren't opening. I think that probably filled up from that 12% to the what's now 19.5%. That's going to come down a little bit, if I had to guess, but by a little bit, I mean I think we're going to finish the cycle at 19% up in applications. We're currently, as of last year, 90% of applicants had submitted their applications. I think we're probably at like 91/92% this year, because I think the elimination of games made it a front-loaded cycle. We might even be at like 93/94% applications submitted this time this year. If you want more scary data on how competitive it is, not just the 19.5% up: 191 schools have application increases, and only six have application decreases. I'm not even sure if it was that skewed in the COVID era. No one would have known that.

This was an incredibly competitive cycle. So if you're listening to this and you applied this cycle and you didn't get your results, you're not in a vacuum. You are competing against crazy numbers, and the worst of it probably is this LSAT bubble, a word I generally don't like. I don't know why I don't like it. But 165 to 169—up 30.3% from last year. 170 to 174—32.6%. 175 to 180—39.3%. And then the next highest category is 160 to 164. All the highest categories are at the highest markers. Which doesn't make sense. Now, the people who make the LSAT, LSAC, to my knowledge, haven't provided any data relative to the full test, and they may. My understanding, having talked to people who have talked to them and having talked to them, is they think the test is normal and controlled for. If you remove the logic games, which they can, from previous tests with practice logic games that were not scored, they had a great deal of confidence going in that the test would be the same. The test, obviously, the scoring looks different. So what my best guesses are is that, one, you got to choose. In the previous tests where they would have a second game section in, the population sample wasn't choosing, "I'm going to take games or I'm not going to take games." It was just put in there for them. But once they had to announce—and they did the right thing by announcing that they were getting rid of games. They may have been legally bound to do that; I don't know. But either way, they did the right thing. Because if they hadn't announced, you wouldn't have this choice. So they announced they were getting rid of games. They announced pretty early. And then so what happened? People got to pick, "Okay, I'm good at games, so I'm going to take it," or, "I'm not good at games, so come September, I'm going to take the LSAT last." Basically, you got to pick which test you're good at. That's extraordinarily rare. You don't—most people who take the LSAT don't get to say, "I'm good at this section, so I'm going to take it when it pops," or, "I'm bad at this section, so I'm going to take it when they get rid of it." Another factor that may come into play is that games ate up the most study time. So you take away that, and you're freeing up a great deal of study time for less things to study for.

We'll see what LSAC says. What I can't imagine—because I've never heard them do this, although I'd love to be wrong—what I can't imagine they say is, "Look, we thought we had a stable test by removing games. We were wrong, and going forward, we'll make the scoring harder, or we'll add another section. We'll do something to normalize this bubble." Historically, that would never come from their mouths. It just doesn't seem to be in their DNA. Historically, what they would say is, "The test is the gold standard," something along those lines, and "It's the best test out there, and it's not the test, it's the people taking the test that changed," right? So we'll see. But the competitiveness of the cycle was not just based on the 19.5% increase, which, to be fair, LSAC had nothing to do with.

A competitive cycle means lots of waitlist activity. There's a ton of people on waitlists right now. If I wanted to say three and a half, four months from now, "Boy, I was right," I would say the following: It is going to be a horrible waitlist year, and very few people are going to be admitted off the waitlist. And the reason why it's going to feel like that in three or four months is because there was so much waitlist activity, because of this competition and increasing applications, so many people were waitlisted that a smaller fraction, a smaller percentage of people, will be getting off the waitlist.

But here's how I think it's going to play out, having talked to a lot of schools and looked at the data—the data on LSD.law is not great, but it does give us data. Our internal Spivey Consulting data, in some sense we think it's better because there are no false positives. Our clients can't lie to us about their data; we have it. So that data is very stable. Here's what it's looking like.

So most years, I'm going to call it V1 or V2, and then I think we're heading to V3, which is something I've never talked about before. I doubt it's unique, but it's very close to unique. So V1 is, most likely, the cycle's not competitive, or schools mess up and under-admit, and then it's just, the dominoes fall. So the schools at the top start admitting heavily off the waitlist—and you see this many years—dominoes are falling at the top, and it's just waves, which is why we use the word "waves," of admits coming from those dominoes.

Unfortunately, there are years where schools don't have to admit off the waitlist, and you saw this during the COVID/LSAT-Flex era, and no dominoes fall. So if dominoes above you don't fall, you're not going to have melt; you're not going to lose seat-deposited applicants from schools above you if they're not admitting off the waitlist, and then the schools below them sit tight.

V1 is the dominoes fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, and there's waitlist activity all summer long. V2 is no dominoes fall, and there's exceptionally little waitlist activity. I don't think we're going to see that. So I'm calling this V3, which is, it's going to go like this: instead of admit, admit, admit, admit, admit in V1, or stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop in V2, it is going to be a hybrid, because some schools are over-deposited and some schools are under-deposited. There's no way every law school shares their data with anyone about this, but we know enough to say with some predictability or possibility, it's going to look like this. And don't overread into what I'm saying, so when I say "stop, stop, stop, stop," that doesn't mean I'm saying the top four schools. I'm just giving an example, okay? But it's going to look like this: Stop, stop, stop. Domino, domino, domino, domino. Stop, stop. Domino, domino. Stop, stop. Okay, and that gets annoying, so I'm not going to keep going. But there will be intermittent periods of waitlist activity, followed by long pauses, followed by intermittent periods. It is going to be shotgun scattered out, if I had to predict. And no one wants to predict, because no one knows.

I do know that there are schools out there that need to make waitlist admits. I do know that schools have already made waitlist admits. And I do know waitlist admits are coming; I know that. I don't know how much, but there's another variable to consider, which is twofold. It's, how many international students—which the ABA stopped collecting that data for non-residents last year—but how many international students make up the admit pool, and then what's going to happen both—actually, there's three elements. What's going to happen with their ability to get visas? Something I'm not an expert on, but with the new administration, that's come up to just about everyone we've talked to. What's going to happen if an international student—and I'm not international, I'm born American, right, so I cannot predict this, and maybe international students can weigh in—what if international students say, "To heck with it, I'm going to stay in my country." That's a possibility. I'm not saying I'm predicting it; I'm saying it's a possibility. So I'm not predicting any of this, but it's a possibility that international JD admits, some, more than previous years, might not be visa eligible. It is a possibility that some international students might not want to come to law school in the United States, where higher education is being battered in the media because of activities in our executive branch of the government. Not just the executive branch; I mean, let me give you even a higher global order, because I also talked to college presidents. President Trump is not talking to universities. He might not even be aware of what's going on. He has a task force that's hammering universities. University presidents have tried to talk to this task force, and they're not talking. You know, if you're the president of Harvard, you have a lot of political capital behind you. So they're talking to Congress, but they're not talking to the task force. And Congress comes into play, and the Supreme Court comes into play. If you read Justice Roberts' opinion in SFFA, it differs from what the executive branch of the government is saying right now about admissions. So that's why there's so much unpredictability, because we don't know what the executive branch is going to do. They seem to be incredibly unpredictable across many vectors, not just admissions. We don't know what Congress will do, because they are engaging with colleges and law schools and universities. So in respect to international students wanting to come here, it's like a daily different dose of news, whether there will be the same amount of visa eligibility. And then a third factor—I can't imagine you've considered this—is schools have large LLM programs. If that LLM program, I can't predict this, but the possibility is, if that LLM program of international students is decimated, what they would probably or possibly do is admit more JD students to make up for that revenue.

So if I'm on the waitlist, and here's the punchline, this summer, I am actively staying engaged with schools, not overly so, maybe once every month and a half, and then when you hit July, you can pick it up a little bit, "I'm still interested. I'm still interested." You can catch lightning in a bottle by emailing the right school on the right day. If you email them the day they decide they need 10 admits, what would they rather do? Go read 500 applications that are waitlisted, or you happen to email them, pull your application, read it, say, "Hey, this is a good person," give you a phone call, "Are you interested?" You know, a feeler call. You're super interested, and then 30 minutes later, and I've lived this life many years over, you get admitted that day. And there could be a wave, we don't know, but there could be a late, late wave, a huge wave, an Interstellar—my favorite movie—looking wave late. There could be. There's going to be waitlist admits. We know there are, because we know schools need to. There's going to be schools that are dying to lose seat deposits because they're over-seat deposited. And those schools are highly likely not going to be making waitlist admits even if dominoes above them fall. I can't name the schools; if I do, they would forever not tell me information going forward. But we know this for a fact.

So, let me summarize. For the people that get waitlist admits, and I know they're coming, it's obviously going to feel great, but then they disappear. You see it all the time; "I'm peacing out; cycle's over." And then the people hanging on and hanging on, it's going to feel really slow and painful, even as waitlisted people are getting admitted. There's a possibility that you get hit by one of these intermittent waves, and then there's a possibility that there's a huge wave at the end. So stay engaged. If you have a dream school, a favorite school, it's not over until two days into orientation. And every year, a few people don't show up to orientation, and there are a couple of admits off the waitlist in September. It's just so lovely when you talk to these people, you know, "I'm at this school, I just went through orientation, and now I'm getting in my car because Stanford"—true story—"just admitted me one day into their orientation."

Hang in there, would be my advice. Be professional, but be persistent, and most of all, just be ebullient when you're talking to admissions professionals. You might be having the worst day of your life, and if that phone rings and it's from an Ann Arbor or a Philadelphia or a Cambridge area code, put on the happiest voice you can and answer the phone, because if you're upbeat late in the cycle and they really need someone, that's when admits happen.

It's not going to be a great waitlist summer. It's not going to be the worst waitlist summer. It's going to be a weird version in between. I hope this was helpful. This was Mike Spivey of the Spivey Consulting Group.

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November 11, 2025

GW Law Dean Dayna Matthew on Law School Admissions, Employment, & the Future of Legal Education

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike has a conversation with Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, where she has led the law school since 2020. Prior to her time at GW, she was a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Colorado Law School, and the University of Kentucky College of Law, and she has served as a Senior Advisor to the Office of Civil Rights of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She is a graduate of Harvard University (AB), the University of Virginia School of Law (JD), and the University of Colorado (PhD).

Mike and Dean Matthew discuss the increase in law school applicants this cycle (7:42 and 18:11), advice for applying during a competitive cycle (12:16), how the large firm hiring process in law school has changed into something that "bears no resemblance" to how it worked for decades (5:11), how the public interest and government hiring process has changed as well (6:27), how AI could impact legal employment in the future (24:10), why she chose the law school where she attended (2:33), what she would do differently if she were applying today (3:36), how to assess law schools' varying "personalities" (13:22), the fungibility of a JD (16:45), advice for law students (18:53), and what it's like being a law school dean in 2025 (28:53).

You can read more about Dean Matthew here.

We discussed two additional podcast interviews in this episode:

Note: Due to an unexpected technical issue during recording, Mike's audio quality decreases from 7:35 onward. Apologies for any difficulties this may cause, and please note that we have a full transcript of the episode below.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript with timestamps below.

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Correction: Dean Matthew's family reminded her that she actually applied to three law schools rather than two, including Harvard Law, where she received a denial.

As Emmy-winning news anchor Elizabeth Vargas stated in one of our recent episodes, "There is nobody out there who is at the top of their field, in any field, who has not been told 'no.'"

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Scholarships

October 28, 2025

Financial Aid & Student Loans After the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with Sydney Montgomery & Kristin Shea

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Spivey consultant and former admissions dean Nikki Laubenstein discusses the financial aid and student loan considerations that prospective law students should be thinking about post-“Big Beautiful Bill,” joined by Sydney Montgomery, who is the Executive Director & Founder of Barrier Breakers, and Kristin Shea, who has led the law school financial aid office at Syracuse University for almost a decade as a part of a 20-year career in legal education.

Nikki, Sydney, and Kristen talk about the changes to student loans and student loan caps resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (9:53), the changes to repayment plans (36:08), who those changes apply to (5:31), the differences between undergraduate financial aid/scholarships and law school financial aid/scholarships (21:02), understanding tuition vs. total cost of attendance and how that relates to scholarship reconsideration and student loan caps (24:27), possible ways schools could help fill the gap especially for students targeting public interest jobs (38:31), advice for those planning to work while in law school (41:10), why prospective law students should start thinking about financial aid earlier on in the admissions process than most do (30:57), and more.

Barrier Breakers is a nonprofit that has worked with 7,000+ first-generation and other marginalized students on the college and law school application process. Sydney Montgomery, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant mother and military parents, was the first person from her high school to go to Princeton University and then later Harvard Law School. She has dedicated her life and career to supporting first-generation students and has a particular passion for financial aid. She is a member of the Forbes Nonprofit Council and has been featured in Inc., Forbes, FastCompany, Medium, CNBC, and others.

Kristin Shea is a higher education professional with twenty years of experience, including law school enrollment management, recruitment, and financial aid; alumni, donor, and employer relations; and marketing and communications. The last decade of her career has been dedicated to financial aid, and she is passionate about helping law students make smart, thoughtful financial plans for their education. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology and psychology and an MBA from Le Moyne College.

We hope to do a follow-up episode in the spring with more information on how law schools are addressing these changes. We also encourage you to reach out to the financial aid offices of schools you're considering once admitted to learn about any programs they may offer and any assistance they can provide. As Kristin says in this episode, "The map may have some alternative directions, but you can still reach your destination, and there are many people who want to help." We have also linked a number of financial aid resources below.

Financial Aid & Student Loan Resources

Federal Student Aid:

AccessLex Institute Resources:

Student Loan Calculator | AccessLex
Student Aid Policy and Action Center | AccessLex
Paying for Law School | AccessLex
Guide to Private Student Loans | AccessLex
Scholarship Databank | AccessLex – includes more than 800 law scholarship and writing competitions (totaling more than $3M).

Free Credit Report:
Annual Credit Report.com - Home Page

Equal Justice Works – LRAP FAQ
Important Questions to Ask About Any LRAP - Equal Justice Works

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You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript with timestamps below.

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Well-Being

Motivation

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In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike interviews Elizabeth Vargas, journalist and television news anchor, on her journey to learning how to cope healthily with lifelong anxiety and panic attacks, on overcoming professional setbacks, and on advice for young people facing the stresses of the LSAT, law school admissions, law school, and finding legal employment.

Elizabeth Vargas anchors “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” (weeknights, 7 p.m. ET), an hour-long weekday news program that debuted April 3, 2023 on NewsNation. Vargas has traveled the world covering breaking news stories, reporting in-depth investigations, and conducting newsmaker interviews. She previously hosted the hit newsmagazine show “20/20” on ABC for 15 years, served as Co-Anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, and was a news anchor and frequent host of “Good Morning America.” She also hosted A&E Investigates, a series of documentaries that still air on Hulu.

In 2016, Vargas released her memoir, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction, which spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won numerous awards. Vargas is a member of the board of directors for the non-profit Partnership to End Addiction and hosts “Heart of the Matter,” a podcast focused on addiction, recovery, and the stigma so many face in their effort to heal.

Vargas mentions and recommends writer Mary Karr's books, The Liars' Club and Lit, in this episode.

Mike also discusses our interview with Justin Ishbia, who was the last person admitted to Vanderbilt Law from the waitlist when he applied and now owns the Phoenix Suns.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript with timestamps below.

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Waitlist Predictions for the 2024-2025 Law School Admissions Cycle

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Waitlist Predictions for the 2024-2025 Law School Admissions Cycle

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