From Aspirations to Game Plan: LSAC and AALS Collaborate to Study What Undergrads Aspire to Do After Graduation—and What They’re Doing About It

By Elizabeth Bodamer 

At LSAC, we often hear from future lawyers that the path to law school can be daunting — especially early on. “My journey to law school has been filled with trial and error,” one LSAT taker told us. “I started this journey alone in 2017, lacking the help, guidance, and knowledge needed. I made mistakes along the way but tried to learn as much as possible to achieve my goal of getting accepted into law school.”

While making mistakes can be an important part of learning, too often those mistakes reflect a lack of access to timely, reliable guidance. To truly support students on the path to law school, LSAC and other stakeholders must better understand what students are thinking, feeling, and doing, especially at earlier stages of the journey. Strengthening this understanding is essential to reducing barriers, expanding opportunity, and ensuring that talent is not lost due to gaps in information or support.

LSAC and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) are partnering on the recently-announced Before the JD II study, to examine undergraduate students’ decisions about their future careers and postgraduate education. This new study builds on the original Before the JD study , which was conducted by AALS almost a decade ago, at a time when law school application numbers were in decline.

By contrast, applicant volumes have hit record highs in the past two admission cycles and are set to remain high for the current cycle; accordingly, the 2025 1L class was the largest since 2012.

This study, though, is about more than legal education because it comes amid a period of social, economic, political, technological, and cultural change. We believe these findings will significantly contribute to broader conversations about how higher education fits that shifting landscape.[1] Students face varied academic experiences and disparate levels of access to resources and networks. How are their career aspirations affected by these differences? The answers to that question can give undergraduate institutions, employers, graduate programs, and stakeholders valuable insights to inform decisions on what they need to better allocate resources, support, and interventions to ensure student success.[2]

Specifically, we envision producing actionable data that can be used by:  

• Undergraduate institutions to inform how they fund and staff their programs and campuses to best prepare students for success, strengthening the value of their education  

• Law and graduate program deans and faculty to explore how to better partner with undergraduate institutions to strengthen pathways to law and graduate school, and how to improve recruiting of new school classes   

• Higher education and career stakeholders, including pathway programs and prelaw, pre-professional, academic, and career advisors, to better inform how they can effectively support potential law and/or graduate students and bridge resources, information, and opportunity gaps in higher education