This short lesson's all about the rolling admissions cycle and how it impacts when you should apply.
Rolling admissions refers to the process by which schools evaluate applicants each admissions cycle. As applications come in, they're evaluated. Schools then release batches of acceptances for the following fall, some as early as August and September.
This has major implications on both your admissions chances as well as your scholarship opportunities.
TL;DR — Apply as early as you can with your best possible LSAT score.
Admissions Impact
Imagine you're a law school with 100 spots per 1L class. You get 50 applications as soon as you open your application, 20 of whom are exceptional candidates—great stats, great essays, the whole nine yards. It's possible that you immediately choose to admit these 20. Maybe you admit the best 10 and wait to assess the other 40 in the pool as more applications come in. All of this is possible.
The moral of this story is that a significant percentage of an incoming class could be filled up within weeks of a school opening its application.
That means your best chance at admission comes earliest in the cycle.
Scholarship Impact
Admission is also a prerequisite for scholarship consideration. Not to mention, each school's going to have a finite amount of merit aid to distribute each admissions cycle.
Who do you think has a better chance at those finite scholarship dollars—the folks who applied as early as possible or the ones waiting for application deadlines? You guessed it. The early bird gets this worm.
Simply put, as more offers of admission go out, so do scholarship offers. And as those finite resources deplete, even if you manage to get in late in a cycle, you'll end up paying for someone else's spot in your class with your cash or student loans.
Caveats
I'd be remiss not to make some disclosures to this advice.
First off, I'm by no means an admissions consultant. We may dabble in that realm in the future, but for now, this advice comes from a handful of credible resources who all want to see you attend school as inexpensively as possible (ideally for free).
Second, it's still possible to get admitted and receive scholarship opportunities applying by, say, November. Is it in your best interest? No. And for the reasons stated above. But it's possible. You can still test in August and October with decent odds, especially if you're an otherwise stellar applicant at the school or schools in question.
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That's all for when to apply. See you next time in our final lesson about law school debt.