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On April 30, the Trump administration finalized its changes to the federal student loan program. Among the changes, it eliminated the Grad PLUS program, capped annual federal student loans for professional programs at $50,000 per year, reconfigured income-based loan-repayment programs, and greatly narrowed the paths to loan forgiveness. These changes go into effect on July 1.
Together with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision ending affirmative action in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the federal government’s recent attacks on higher education, the uncertainty surrounding law school admissions will become a lot more pronounced. By no means a new phenomenon, the risks surrounding law school admissions make it a high-stakes gamble for those students who are least prepared to absorb the costs. Unfortunately, much of the commentary about these changes obscures more than it reveals about these risks.
The media discussion of changes in law school admissions has focused almost exclusively on enrollment at elite universities. (Consider, for example, the recent New York Times article “At Many Top Law Schools, Black Student Enrollment Continues to Drop,” assessing the enrollment of Black students at 18 of the nation’s top law schools.)
Professional organizations and governing bodies, on the other hand, emphasize the slow but increasing progress toward the diversification of the profession and the overall long-term trend of the increasing number of lawyers of color.
Both narratives miss the real story, which I’ve previously described as a cascade effect. This is the downward pressure on underrepresented students to accept weaker offers (offers charging higher tuition with less aid) to less selective law schools due to the tightening of admission to elite programs. This downward pressure is what poses the greatest danger to talented students of color entering law, and to the long-term health of the legal profession.
Hidden beneath the top-line takeaways, a more detailed analysis of the data shows that recent increases in the enrollment of underrepresented students in law schools are almost exclusively concentrated in the least selective law schools. This is important, because decreased law school selectivity, as measured by median LSAT scores, is correlated with lower bar-passage rates, lower median salaries, higher underemployment and unemployment rates, and higher debt-to-income ratios.
This downward pressure is particularly pronounced for Black and Hispanic students, who are the most vulnerable to inequities in law school admissions. The only law schools that saw year-over-year increases in their percentages of Black and Hispanic first-year enrollments in 2025 were those with median LSAT scores of 154 and below (the highest possible score is 180). Asian first-year law students fared slightly better, increasing their share of the enrollment in schools with median LSAT scores of 155 to 159, but their enrollment decreased across all other law school tiers. Native and Pacific Islander first years saw very slight increases (of 0.1 percent) in schools with median LSAT scores between 160 and164 and in the lowest (154 and below) tier, while declining slightly or staying flat in all other tiers. Students identifying as multiracial saw increases mostly across the board, but this was not enough to offset the overall decline in enrollment for students of color in law schools at all tiers except the very lowest one.
The cascade effects on law school enrollment for students of color reverberate throughout their careers. Despite continuous increases in law school tuition, only graduates from the top seven law schools have median earnings over $200,000 after accounting for student debt payments. Most new law graduates (53 percent) earn between $55,000 and $100,000 per year. And the median salary for graduates from the bottom 33 law schools is below $55,000 once median debt is taken into account, placing graduates at great risk of being unable to afford their ballooning investment in a law degree.
Even these numbers obscure vast disparities, however. According to a recent Law School Admission Council study, Black first-year students carry an average debt of $108,713, which is 43 percent more than the average debt of all first-year respondents ($76,300); 31 percent of Black students expect to ultimately owe $150,000 or more. Hispanic first years carry on average $86,356 in debt, or 13 percent more than average. First-generation college graduates anticipate owing 20 percent more than continuing-generation students, and Pell Grant recipients anticipate an average law school debt of roughly 50 percent more than that of nonrecipients.
And these differences do not account for great disparities in the sources of these debts—federal versus private student loans—the latter of which come with higher interest rates and more onerous conditions. Recent longitudinal research on the long-term impact of law school debt suggests that disparities between Black and white law students redound throughout their careers. The upcoming changes to the federal student loan programs will exacerbate these effects.
The picture that emerges from this disaggregated data is one of ever-increasing pressure on students of color and students with the fewest resources, who are shouldering the highest debt burdens and bearing the highest risks of falling underwater with law school debt, even as they are shut out of many of law’s opportunities. Reporting that focuses only on top-line data and the admissions of an elite few institutions misdirects our focus. And reflecting on the slow progress toward diversification of the profession without disaggregating admission trends offers a distorted picture of the direction the profession is going.
Over all, law schools, and the legal profession, must rethink the burdens they place on incoming students to fund the growth and resiliency of the profession so they can fully benefit from the contributions that these overburdened students can offer.
