#trending – October 6, 2025

By Kyle McEntee

Now that the 2024-2025 application cycle has concluded, the data tells us that applicants finished up 18.3% at 76,609. These applicants submitted 523,263 applications (+22.3%) for an average of 6.8 applications per applicant, which is up slightly but consistent with recent history.

Notably, 28.9% of applicants were first-generation college graduates. After rising in 2022 and 2023 to 29.7%, the percentage has declined over the past two cycles. LSAC began collecting this datapoint within the past decade, so we don't have historical benchmarks. It's a trend to keep an eye on, particularly because it started before the recent federal student loan changes.

Starting on July 1, 2026, any JD student borrowing for a new program will no longer have access to Grad Plus loans. Rather than a $20,500 annual limit for Direct loans, the annual limit will be $50,000 with a lifetime cap at $200,000 for professional school (including graduate school). With the cost of attendance exceeding $50,000 at nearly all ABA-approved law schools, students and schools alike worry about the impact of these limits. If you want to learn more about the federal loan program, including changes to repayment plans, I recommend watching the July 2025 webinar, available to prelaw advisors by clicking the Webinar tile on the legacy dashboard of your prelaw advisor account on LSAC.org. Students can access the same webinar on LawHub.org .

In addition to these statutory changes impacting how students pay for law school, the Education Department is moving forward with changes to Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) after negotiated rulemaking. Under PSLF, borrowers will have their federal student loans forgiven after 120 payments while working for a qualified employer.

The new rule aims to limit qualification and will reduce forgiveness by $1.5 billion with new eligibility rules. According to a detailed story on Inside Higher Ed , "The [Department of Education] stressed in its statement and throughout the draft rule that it’s designed to exclude groups that focus on certain social issues or ideologies." While the rule is likely to be challenged in court, federal policy clearly aims to reduce the scope of PSLF.

The potential impact of federal student loan policy on applicant behavior needs limited explanation. A lot of law students rely on more than $50,000 per year of federal student loans. But there are many factors that may impact the upcoming cycle, so the consequences are still unclear to me. During the August advising webinar, I presented a list of questions to highlight what I am paying attention to in addition to new federal loan policy:

• How will the macroeconomy affect applicant behavior?
• How will politics related to democracy and the rule of law affect applicant behavior?
• How will banks and state-sponsored lending entities respond to possible new business?
• Will we see program, university, state, and/or regional differences in lending practices, from terms to availability at all?
• How will law schools and their universities change tuition or scholarshipping practices, if at all?
• Will the net effect impact overall 1L enrollment or class composition?

So far, this testing cycle indicates that we'll see another increase in applicants. LSAT registrants at the deadline were up 18.1% in August, 22.5% in September, and 12.8% in October. The November LSAT is currently up 11.5% with about a month to go before the administration begins.

While these are early patterns, they're nonetheless meaningful and warrant caveats. First, these numbers do not distinguish between first-time and repeat test takers. We don’t yet know how the federal loan changes and increased competitiveness last cycle are going to affect repeat test-taking behavior. Second, test takers apply at a pretty high rate in a cycle that is different from the one in which they tested. About a third of applicants with an LSAT score of 165 or higher earned that score the testing cycle before they applied. This has been consistent for a while.

As always at this very early point in the application cycle, how competitiveness, demographics, and final tallies shake out depend on factors known and unknown. Applicants are not a monolith, just a group you measure because they all share one critical trait: they completed an application to an ABA-approved law school.