Last Updated on August 12, 2023 by Oluwajuwon Alvina

Do Non-Traditional Law School Applicants Have an Admissions Advantage?

Anyone who has read my posts on the blog knows that I’m passionate about using data to learn not only what factors might influence law school admissions decisions, but also to what extent those factors do, as well as the differences in how different aspects of an application package affect admissions decisions at different law schools.

So far, I’ve looked at whether application time matters, the advantages (or lack thereof) of binding early decision choices, which institutions are more receptive of splitter and reverse-splitter candidates, and how an applicant’s ability to claim underrepresented minority status may affect outcomes. In this piece, we’ll look at the data to see if – and how – nontraditional students (also known as NonTrads) fare differently in law school admissions.

Although “nontraditional” candidate status isn’t a well-defined category, it reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement in Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it.” The broad concept is that a non-traditional law school applicant is someone who hasn’t followed the standard high school to college to law school path, and hence is older and likely has more job and life experience than a “traditional” law school applicant. It’s difficult to say how much older or more experienced someone should be, but for our purposes, atypical applicants are those who self-identify as such in our data, and that seems like a good approach to handle it.

Another difference between studying a prospective “unconventional boost” (that is, an advantage granted to nontraditional applicants merely because of their nontraditional status) and analyzing the same for, say, URM applicants is that the theoretical grounds of such a boost are much less. If such a thing exists, it could be because law schools believe that someone with a bit more life experience will take law school more seriously and so be more successful. A large gap between undergrad and law school, on the other hand, may suggest that the applicant has been out of the academy for so long that reintegration and success will be difficult. Perhaps, in their desire for diversity, schools should consider not only ethnicity but also gender.

With that in mind, I’m going to look for an unconventional boost in the same manner I looked for a URM-boost. I’ll start by measuring the effects of unconventional status on admissions results while controlling for a range of other quantifiable characteristics to see if we can quantify such a gain. Then, for those schools in the USNWR top 100 for which we have adequate user-reported data, I’ll offer average LSAT and GPA values for both nontraditional and traditional admits. Through begin, this research is based on information provided by law school applicants themselves, and it spans the 2009/10 to 2015/16 application periods. Individual candidates’ unconventional status was also self-reported. Finally, the tables here reflect USNWR rankings prior to the very recent 2018 release, but I now include Top 13 tables instead of Top 14 tables based on the 2018 rankings (since I would argue that the concept of the Top 14 is no longer current since Georgetown dropped out and Texas has not always been there).

Does a nontraditional boost exist?

Unlike the URM boost, which appears to exist in nearly every school we investigated, the unconventional boost appears to exist at only a few schools, and a few of those schools appear to disfavor nontraditional applicants. Let’s have a peek, shall we? (The percentage increase in odds of acceptance for atypical applicants compared to traditional applicants is presented in the table, controlling for LSAT, GPA, applicant sex, ED application, URM status, and month the application was submitted.)

As you can see, only twelve law schools seem, based on the data, to provide any sort of boost to non-traditional applicants, and that boost ranges from 337% at the University of Connecticut to 76% at Georgetown. Half as many schools (six) actually appear to disadvantage nontraditional applicants, with those applicants having their chances cut from between 50% at American to 73% at the University of Chicago, when compared to otherwise identical peers (at least as far as our controls – LSAT, GPA, etc. go). And, of course, you can see that the vast majority of these schools demonstrate no statistically significant effects of an applicant’s nontraditional status.

In order to bring the analysis a little closer to a more easily-digested reality, I present a few tables that show the average LSAT and GPA scores for admitted nontraditional students vs. admitted traditional students for the schools in question here. The schools are listed in order of the difference between the average traditional admit’s LSAT and that of the average nontraditional admit. Please note that nothing else is controlled for here, and these are just the raw numbers; in other words, these are just descriptive statistics for your viewing pleasure, and these tables alone aren’t indicative of any statistically significant difference in the acceptance rates of applicants based on their nontraditional status. (Due to rounding, the differential score sometimes seems off by 0.1.)

You’ll note that, for the most part, accepted traditional applicants had higher LSATs than accepted nontraditional applicants, with the number sometimes being pretty substantial (Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard really stand out here). It’s also worth noting that 6 out of the top 10 LSAT differentials are Top 13 schools.

And now, for a look at just the Top 13 law schools, isolated.

There’s honestly not much to say here, and since we’re just looking at raw numbers. It may be worth noting that Columbia and Stanford actually exhibit the opposite tendency, in that nontraditional admits have higher average LSATs, whereas everywhere else traditional admits’ LSAT scores were at least 0.6 higher on average.

In the following tables, we repeat the same exercise for GPA:

We have a wide range of differentials here as well, this time for the GPA. What strikes me the most is that practically every institution has at least a mediocre GPA for conventional students, and this is true of all Top 13 colleges. This could be because colleges are willing to be a little more lenient with nontraditional students’ lower GPAs because they’ve placed some time between themselves and those GPAs, and have ostensibly developed and become more serious in the interim. On the other hand, if you just finished your undergrad GPA (or, in many cases, are still creating it) before applying to law school, there’s little reason to assume you’ll be any better.

So, there you have it. In a nutshell, a quantifiable nontraditional boost does exist for some schools, but about half that many seem to actually disadvantage nontraditional applicants.