Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School: admission requirements and 509 data

What the 2025 numbers say about Southern Illinois University Simmons

Southern Illinois University Simmons received 724 completed applications for the 2025 entering class and made 407 offers of admission, an acceptance rate of 56.2%. 132 of those admitted enrolled, a yield of 32.4%. The full first-year class came to 133 students, all full time. Total JD enrollment across all years is 313.

Enrolled students posted a median LSAT of 149, with a 25th percentile of 146 and a 75th of 155. That is 10 points below the 159 median across the 196 ABA-approved schools in this data. It ranks 189 of 196 on LSAT median. Undergraduate GPA ran 2.93 at the 25th percentile, 3.38 at the median and 3.78 at the 75th. 2 of the entering class were admitted on a GRE score rather than an LSAT score.

The school bills tuition by the credit hour rather than by the year, at $547 a credit, against the 90 credits the JD requires. The school's own living-expense estimate for a single student off campus is $18,608. 172 JD students hold a grant or scholarship, 64% of the student body, and the median full-time award is $9,500. 7 awards cover full tuition or more.

Of the graduating class that sat a bar exam for the first time, 47 of 79 passed, a rate of 59.49%. The weighted average across the jurisdictions where those graduates sat was 79.22%, so the school ran 19.73 points behind the jurisdictions it feeds. Ten months after graduation, 55 of 74 graduates (74.3%) held a job requiring bar admission. 2 joined law firms of 251 lawyers or more (2.7% of the class), of whom 1 went to firms of 501 or more. The largest single destination was Illinois with 41 graduates, followed by Missouri with 9.

Southern Illinois University Simmons has been approved by the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education since 1974. It is a public school based in Carbondale, IL. 7 first-year students left for academic reasons, 7.0% of the class.

The full 509 record

Illinois has 9 ABA-approved law schools. The Illinois guide compares them on LSAT median, cost and bar passage, and covers the state's admission rules.

Data: ABA Standard 509 Information Report (2025), published for consumer disclosure, retrieved from the ABA Required Disclosures portal on 2026-09-01. Bar passage and employment figures come from the same portal's Bar Passage Outcomes and Employment Summary reports for the class of 2024. Figures describe the 2025 to 2026 reporting cycle for Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School and are restated in our own structure; no ABA document or file is reproduced here. Verify anything decision-critical with the school.

Related reading: LSAT score guide, GPA benchmarks, law school cost and ROI, application timeline, all 196 ABA-approved schools, and the Yale profile for the top of the range.