By this time of the year, you may be starting to cast a nervous eye at your fellow law school applicants. How do you match up to them? Have this year’s LSAT averages been tilted in one direction or another? ARE YOU GOING TO GET IN TO YOUR DREAM SCHOOL OR NOT???

Well, I can’t answer that last question. But we can at least chat about the numbers a bit.

The number of people applying to law school for the 2018-2019 year is up by about 3% from last year. This is part of a growing trend — law school applicant numbers are finally starting to recover after the low dip of the mid-2010s.

(Before you start worrying too much, numbers are still well below the dizzying high of 10 years ago. We may be up 1,500 or so applicants from last year, but that’s still nearly 24,000 shy of the 2009-2010 peak. As always, let’s collectively pour one out for our counterparts of one decade ago.)

Practically speaking, this applicant increase means that competition may be stiffer than it’s been for the last few years. Although many law schools have upped class sizes slightly, they’re still trailing behind the overall increase in applicants. In all, there are more people vying for a comparatively static number of seats.

Luckily, you’re Blueprint students reading this. Three cheers for the high-achieving among us, because although applicant numbers are up, high-scoring applicants are still in demand. The number of students scoring in the 150-160 LSAT range has, proportionally, increased. But the percentage of applicants scoring over a 165 has held steady, and the numbers for those scoring over a 175 have taken a breathtaking nearly twenty percent dive.

What’s all this mean for you? It means that higher-scoring LSAT takers won’t be feeling the pinch of an increased applicant pool in quite the same way as some others. In other words, a stellar LSAT score is still going to be one of the best ways to distinguish yourself from a (slightly) more crowded field. Use that as motivation to get off the internet and back to studying. Have you practiced diagramming conditional statements yet today…?