Enrollment in law school of first-gen college grads drops, new LSAC report finds
While the largest number of law school applicants since 2011 resulted in the largest first-year class in recent years, enrollment of first-generation college graduates decreased for the second year, even before changes to student loans and higher education budgets come into effect, according to a report released Wednesday by the Law School Admission Council.
The report, titled The Composition of the First-Year Law School Class and Enrollment 2021-2025 Trends, comes after two full admissions cycles since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and just ahead of the new limitations starting July 1 mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill that kills Grad PLUS loans and imposes strict limits on student borrowing.
Yet the impact of those changes is already being felt, as these types of limitations most strongly impact first-generation college graduates, often dependent on loans to attend law school, sources from the LSAC say.
The 2024-2025 admissions cycle had more than 76,000 applicants, up 18% from a year earlier, according to the report.
Despite the higher number of overall applicants this past year, the figure for first-generation admits has decreased, according to the report—23.2% of the incoming 1L class in 2021 being the first in their family to graduate with a bachelor’s degree but only 21.6% in 2025.
“This should serve as a wake-up call to everyone in legal education,” wrote Sudha Setty, the president and the CEO of the LSAC, to the ABA Journal. “This shift is particularly concerning because first-gen college graduates are a vital way to broaden who gets to be a part of the legal profession and what it means to promote access to justice throughout our society.”
Among 1Ls in 2025, 26.4% of first-generation college graduates are LSAC Fee Waiver program recipients, compared with only 11.4% of the entire 2025 incoming class, the report found. And first-generation college graduates expect to have higher law school debt than their peers, previous LSAC research has shown.
“Unless we take action, this downward trend could accelerate in the years ahead, given the changes in federal financial aid policies,” Elizabeth Bodamer, senior director of applied research for the LSAC, told the Journal.
Also, there was a slight decrease in the racial and ethnic diversity, to 41.4%, for the 2025 cohort, from 41.8% a year earlier, according to the report.
Women have represented the majority of each first-year class since 2015, according to the report, and representation of gender-diverse students has slightly increased. In 2021, 0.8% of the incoming class identified as gender diverse; that number increased to 1.1% in 2025. Also, 14.4% of the 2025 1Ls identify as LGBTQ+, up from 12% in 2021, according to the report.
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