Harvard vs DOJ Why This Changes Your Law School Chances

On Friday, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from forcing universities to hand over seven years of admissions data broken down by race. Then on Monday, three days later, the Education Department turned around and gave Harvard 20 days to hand over that same data or face referral to the Justice Department. Both of those things happened in the span of a week. And nobody in the LSAT space is connecting the dots on what this actually means for you. Because here is what really is going on. The affirmative action fight is colliding with the most competitive law school admissions cycle in over a decade. Applications this cycle are up almost 13 percent, up nearly 39 percent compared to two years ago. The average LSAT median across all law schools just jumped almost two full points in a single year. Schools that used to be your safety are now your target. Schools that were your target are now your reach. And on top of all that, the entire framework for how law schools evaluate applicants is being torn apart and rebuilt in real time. Today, I'm going to break down what's happening and show you the real data and then give you a specific game plan. Nobody else is laying out this clearly. Quick background for anybody new to my channel. In 2023, the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action. It was done as we know it. But then Chief Justice Roberts left a door open. The court says schools cannot consider race as race. No checkbox, no points for being a certain ethnicity. But applicants can still write about how race has affected their lives in their personal statements. So, for example, you can write an essay about growing up as a minority, the obstacles you faced, how your background shaped your goals. That is all protected. The school just can't use that essay as a backdoor to give you a boost because of your racial category. But unfortunately, this is not a clear line. A University of Chicago law professor named Sonia Starr found that right after the ruling, the number of selective schools requiring some kind of diversity or identity essay jumped by 55%. And between 67% and 70% of minority applicants used their personal statements to discuss racial identity compared to less than half of white applicants. Meanwhile, almost every law school in the country rebranded its old diversity statement as a life experience essay or a perspective essay. Of course, they put a new name on it, but it serves a similar function. Now, does that prove schools are laundering affirmative action through the essay? No, of course it doesn't prove it. Writing about race is completely legal. But the Trump administration looked at those numbers and said, something is not adding up. And now they want to prove it with data. And so last August, Trump signed a presidential memorandum demanding that every school receiving federal financial aid, which includes basically every law school, that they all report detailed admissions data through the IPEDS. That is the Federal Higher Education Database, including the race and sex of every applicant, every admitted student, every enrolled student, plus LSAT scores and GPAs, all disaggregated by race. And this is going back seven years retroactively, all the way back to 2018. So think about what that covers. That's three full admission cycles under affirmative action, and then two cycles after the ban. And so if a school was admitting black applicants with a 158 LSAT at the same rate as white applicants with a 168 LSAT before the ruling, and the same pattern continued after the ruling, that is the smoking gun the administration is looking for. And their enforcement threat is pretty serious as well. Schools that don't comply could lose their Title IX eligibility, meaning their students can't use federal loans. Now for law schools, that would be an existential threat. Now last Friday, Judge Saylor blocked it. But he didn't say the government can't collect this data. He said they probably can. But what he struck down was the process, because the 120-day deadline meant the government never properly consulted with universities. He called the whole thing, quote, rushed and chaotic. So the government lost on procedure, not on the substance, which means they can fix their process and come right back. And here is the other thing nobody's talking about. The injunction only covers universities, public ones, in 17 plaintiff states. Private law schools everywhere. Public law schools in the other 33 states are still technically on the hook. Meanwhile, the administration has been picking off schools individually and winning. Brown and Columbia both signed settlement deals to get their federal research funding restored. Both of them agreed to hand over admissions data broken down by race, GPA, and test scores. Both of them agreed to government audits, and both agreed to publicly release their admission statistics. And Columbia went further. They also accepted a government-appointed resolution monitor. That is a federal overseer embedded inside the institution scrutinizing admissions and hiring decisions. Columbia's own Knight First Amendment Institute called it an astonishing surrender of institutional autonomy. George Mason, which has the Antonin Scalia Law School, was found in violation of Title IX for using race in hiring. The government demanded a public apology from the president and ongoing compliance audits. And then the DOJ launched something called the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative. This uses the False Claims Act, which is the same law they use against defense contractors who defraud the Pentagon against universities with triple damages, triple the funding received. So that right there changes the risk calculation for every law school in America overnight. And then of course there's Harvard, which is the main event. The DOJ sued Harvard in February for refusing to hand over five years of applicant-level admissions data, including the undergrad program, the med school, Harvard Law School, all of it. Harvard submitted 2,300 pages of documents, but would not turn over the granular records. And the government accused them of stonewalling. Now here's what's interesting. Harvard's own numbers suggest they actually did change. Asian American undergrad admits jumped from 30% to 41% in just two cycles. At Harvard Law, Black enrollment dropped to its lowest point since the 1960s with only 19 first-year students. So if Harvard were still secretly doing affirmative action, the numbers probably wouldn't look like that. But on Monday, the Education Department gave Harvard 20 days to fully comply or face referral to the Justice Department, and that clock is ticking right now. So that is the political fight. Now let's look at what's happening inside law school admissions, because there's hard data for that as well. UCLA law professor Richard Sander published the most comprehensive study on this in January. He analyzed racial preferences across all American law schools for five admission cycles from 2020 to 2025. And his findings were that, for example, preferences given to Black applicants were cut roughly in half. Hispanic preferences dropped by a comparable or even greater amount. But here is the counterintuitive part. Despite preferences being cut in half, total Black and Hispanic enrollment actually went up, and applications from both groups rose. The 2025 applicant pool was the most racially diverse in the history of legal education. And early data from this current cycle shows Black applicants up another 38%. Now, big caveat here. While total numbers went up, the distribution shifted. Black enrollment as a percentage of the class declined at elite schools. Students who might have gotten into a T14 under the old system are now enrolling one or two tiers below, and that cascades down the entire rankings. According to 2025 ABA data, Black students are 7.5% of law students versus 13.7% of the U.S. population. So they are the most underrepresented of any racial group. Sander also found something else, and this one's a little controversial but also important to mention. Reducing preferences appears to be improving academic outcomes for minority students. His mismatched data showed a student with a 152 LSAT had a 22% first-time bar pass rate at an elite school. That same student with the same LSAT score passed at 51% at a less selective school. Same person, radically different outcome. Based purely on where they chose to enroll, I'm going to come back to that. Now layer all of this on top of the competition numbers, and that's where it gets really serious. Applicants are up 13% this cycle, up 39% over two years. LSAT medians up nearly two points across the board. 28 law schools now have 170 plus LSAT medians. Ten years ago, only five law schools had 170 plus medians. WashU hit a 175 LSAT median. Yale's 75th percentile hit 177. And with affirmative action reduced, schools are leaning even harder on LSAT scores and GPAs to build their classes because those numbers drive the rankings, and rankings drive everything in law school admissions. So things are getting squeezed. More applicants, higher LSATs, rising medians, less flexibility for schools to look beyond the numbers. But I want to give you some actionable takeaways, not just throw a lot of data at you. And so here is your game plan, seven things you should think about. Number one, your LSAT score is the most important number right now. You want to treat it that way. With reduced preferences and medians rising at every law school, your LSAT is doing more heavy lifting in your application than it ever has before. A school you thought you were competitive at with a 168, you might now need a 172 to 173. Applicants in the 175 to 180 range are up 25%. The ceiling is rising, and so is the floor. If you're not where you want to be, do not submit your application. Retake the LSAT, put in the work, get the right score. Just two or three more points can mean the difference between a rejection and getting a full ride. I've seen it thousands of times. And if you're just starting your prep, do not rush. Give yourself three to six months minimum. Build a real foundation. If that means you apply next cycle instead of this one, so be it. A 170 LSAT next year is worth way more than a 162 this year. Number two, you can and maybe should still write about race in your personal statement. Do not let fear stop you. I see a lot of anxiety about this right now. People are afraid if they write about race, the school won't evaluate or they'll get dinged as a result that it'll count against them. The essay carved out is still the law. The Supreme Court explicitly protected this. Your personal statement is yours. You can write about whatever you want. The key is specificity. Don't write about race in the abstract. Don't make it a sociology paper. Tell a specific story from your life. Show the reader something they cannot get from anyone else's application, and connect it to why you want to become a lawyer, not in general, but specifically. The best personal statements I've read are the ones where I finish reading and I feel like I know the person. I know exactly why they're here and why they're applying, and that has not changed. It won't change no matter what the Trump administration does. Number three, do not skip the perspective essay. Don't phone it in. Most schools have replaced the old diversity statement with life experience or perspective essay, but the number one mistake I see is treating it as afterthought. This cycle, medians are rising. Schools have less room for subjective errors. The essay is one of the last places you can differentiate yourself beyond your numbers, and so if you have a genuine story about adversity, about a perspective that shaped your background, about an experience that gave you empathy or resilience or grit, write about it. Put in as much effort as you are into your personal statement, and if you are not an underrepresented minority, you can still write this essay as well, especially if you're a first-gen college student, military veteran, grew up in a rural community, worked in construction or drove trucks or waited tables, doesn't matter. You have a unique perspective. You can include that in your essay. Don't leave it blank. Number four, research which schools are under particular political pressure right now and factor that into your strategy. Schools like Harvard, Columbia, Brown, George Mason, all of them have been directly targeted by the Trump administration. They're going to be hyper-cautious. They're going to lean harder on the pure numbers. They will be more reluctant to use subjective factors that could even look like racial preferences, but a school that is outside the spotlight might have more of a traditional hypothetical holistic review approach with more flexibility, more room to consider your full profile. Now, I'm not telling you to game the system, but you've got to understand the realities. Different schools are under different degrees of scrutiny right now, and it would be naive to pretend that doesn't affect how they view your application. Number five, seriously consider the scholarship at a school one tier below your reach. So, for example, imagine you've got a 166 LSAT and a 3.7 GPA. Five years ago, that's lower T14 range. This year, with medians up and applicant value at historic highs, you might get a waitlist at those schools, but at top 25, top 30 school, they might give you serious scholarship money, maybe half tuition, maybe more, because you're above their median and they want you. Now, remember, at the school where you are below the median, you are more likely to end up in the bottom third of the class. At a school where you're above the median, more likely to be in the top third, and the class rank is what determines whether you get the call back, the clerkship interview, the job offer. So, you can go to the more prestigious school, take on $200,000 in debt, finish in the bottom third, and struggle to find a job, or you can take the scholarship, graduate near the top of your class, big fish, small pond, less debt or no debt, and have employers competing for you. I see this happen all the time. The prestige trap is real, and it's more dangerous than ever. Number six, more transparency might actually be the best thing that ever happened to applicants. I want you to step back from politics for a second and think about what actually happens if the government gets the data and makes it public. Right now, admissions is a black box aside from user-submitted content on law school decisions or law school data. Right now, you send in your application, you wait, you get a yes or a no with no explanation, no context, no idea whether you were close or nowhere near it. But if now schools are forced to publicly report who applied, who got in, what their credentials were, broken down by LSAT, by GPA, by race, that changes everything because you will see the actual admit rates for people with your exact profile. You can then make data-driven decisions instead of guessing. And so, whatever you think about politics driving this, more transparency, I think, is a win. Full stop. I've been wanting this for 20 years. Number seven, do not let any of this scare you out of applying. Now, I want to end it here because I know some of you are watching this and feeling overwhelmed because the headlines are scary, the competition numbers look scary, everything feels like it's under your feet, but here is what the data actually says. Applications from underrepresented minorities have gone up since the ruling, not down. The 2025 applicant pool was the most diverse in history. Black applicants are up another 38% this cycle. People are not running away from law school. They are running toward it. Law schools do still want diverse classes. They have changed how they go about it, but their commitment to it has not disappeared. They're just expressing it different ways. And so, remember, you belong in this process. If you've got the desire, the work ethic, and a real story to tell, there is a law school for you. Don't let some political fight between the federal government and the universities convince you otherwise. Bottom line, we've got two forces colliding right now, a competitive admissions cycle and an aggressive government intervention. And those two things hitting at the same time means the old playbook doesn't work anymore. But the strategy is clear, it's simple, it's straightforward. Maximize your LSAT. Do not compromise on this. Write admissions essays that are genuinely, specifically about you. Be strategic in your school list. Run the scholarship math. Don't chase prestige at the expense of outcomes, and apply with confidence. I've been teaching the LSAT personally since 2005. I raised my own score up from a 152 to a 175. I've seen every version of this landscape, and what I can tell you is this, those who succeed are the ones who understand the game, do the work, and refuse to give up.