[Not an April Fool’s post!]

What I’m noticing this cycle — one that’s a complete doozy in more ways than one — is that many law schools are keeping even deeper waitlists than usual, at least from my vantage point.

Even in normal cycles, waitlists are unconscionably deep. At some law schools, the entire deposited class would have to be wiped out by an asteroid for them to call up their whole waitlisted pool; sometimes they’ve got multiples of the incoming class size on the list. There’s a reason applicants feel strung along.

And some schools don’t even bother to notify you that you’re on a waitlist — they’re awfully quick to take your application fee, and then… radio silence, even as their own enrollment deposit deadline comes and goes. Until you hear a firm Yes or No, assume you’re on the waitlist if there’s radio silence at this point in the cycle.

And that means more work for you. I’m seeing a lot of waitlist letters sent out to applicants that basically say: Send us another essay that tells us why you’re interested in law and why you’re interested in us. Or do an online recording where you tell us the same thing.

And the kicker is that so many schools ask those questions in their application essays, so if you did a really good job with those, you’ve already laid that reasoning out for them very clearly, or at least as best as you can. So you’re being asked to say the same thing, but maybe a teeny tiny bit differently.

But if that’s what they are asking for, that’s what you give them.

Here’s the weirdness: that redundancy is intentional. These are hoops they are setting up for you to jump through so you can prove to them that you really, really want that offer. (Could they just ask you to make a funny TikTok instead of repeating yourselves? They could. Would that be a lot more fun? Yes.) Waitlists are used for yield protection and yield management. And this year, I bet so many schools were completely overwhelmed by the volume of applications that they kicked the can down the road, put a bunch of people on waitlists to buy themselves more time, and then let applicants self-select during the waitlist process and effectively narrow down the pool on their own. It’s all a bit Hunger Games.

And of course many schools make all these waitlist extras “optional,” so if you don’t realize it’s yield protection and that you need to do certain things to stay in play (especially underserved populations), then you’re hurting yourself without knowing it. That’s the system as it’s set up.

Related: I’ve noticed a lot of applicants get a bit offended when they think they’re qualified for a school that puts them on a waitlist, and they often end up replying with the equivalent of “Talk to the hand,” either in the form of not pursuing the waitlist, or by withdrawing their applications altogether. That’s fine, and in some ways it’s the intended result — they’re forcing you to decide whether you care enough to jump through these sometimes very silly hoops to fight for that spot.

But sometimes it’s not the intended result. I’m seeing some schools lose people who are in fact really interested — those applicants got put on a waitlist, and they’re thinking, “Well, Stanford really wants me, why should I fight for a less prestigious/famous/name-brand school that’s lukewarm about me?” Yield protection can actually backfire.

I’ve also seen some pretty aggressive, heavy-handed behavior from some law schools this cycle. One, for example, makes you withdraw everywhere else by June 1 if you want to accept their scholarship offer, so you wouldn’t be able to wait to see what over offers you might get after June 1 (at least if you want to hang onto that scholarship award). Here’s an example:

So you can stay in play with pending/waitlist schools right up until orientation after you’ve put down your second deposit at that school, but not if you want to keep the scholarship offer. Schools are using different strategies to try to get you to lock yourself in so that you can’t wait to see what other schools do. Or they wait until the last possible second before deposit deadlines to award you a scholarship (even if they made you an admissions offer months ago) so that you don’t have time to use that scholarship to negotiate price with other schools. Don’t forget that they are competing against each other, too; that has also gotten a bit Hunger Games.

Other schools might make you write in your LOCI why you “would accept an offer of admission from the waitlist if it was offered” — basically forcing you to pre-commit to them if you decide to stay on their waitlist, just by virtue of the way they’ve phrased the LOCI prompt. And bad grammar to boot! (It should be “… if it were offered.” Yes, I expect good grammar from law schools.) Here’s an example:

And in that one, they want you to come up with new reasons, ones you haven’t already given in your application essays. Holy god, talk about make-work. So if they gave you a limit of X pages to write your Why Law/Why Us personal essays (as this school in fact did) and you worked really hard to cut your essays down to that length maximum, now they’re saying, “Just kidding, write some more on the same topic now, no page limit.” I can understand why applicants feel their heads spinning.

That’s also a reminder to read their conditions very carefully, because sometimes they play games and make those conditions implicit rather than explicit.

You’ve still got several months to go with waitlist season. Hang in there!