University of South Dakota: admission requirements and 509 data

What the 2025 numbers say about University of South Dakota

University of South Dakota received 405 completed applications for the 2025 entering class and made 253 offers of admission, an acceptance rate of 62.5%. 85 of those admitted enrolled, a yield of 33.6%. The full first-year class came to 88 students, all full time. Total JD enrollment across all years is 252.

Enrolled students posted a median LSAT of 152, with a 25th percentile of 149 and a 75th of 156. That is 7 points below the 159 median across the 196 ABA-approved schools in this data. It ranks 168 of 196 on LSAT median. Undergraduate GPA ran 3.16 at the 25th percentile, 3.47 at the median and 3.81 at the 75th.

Full-time tuition is $12,076 for residents and $32,184 for non-residents, a gap of $20,108 a year. Mandatory fees add $5,037. The school's own living-expense estimate for a single student off campus is $18,034. Tuition, fees and that living estimate add up to $55,255 for one year, or $165,765 across three, before any grant. 139 JD students hold a grant or scholarship, 55% of the student body, and the median full-time award is $5,000. 18 awards cover full tuition or more. The school reports conditional scholarships: 1 entering students held one and 0 had it reduced or eliminated.

Of the graduating class that sat a bar exam for the first time, 53 of 73 passed, a rate of 72.60%. The weighted average across the jurisdictions where those graduates sat was 78.62%, so the school ran 6.02 points behind the jurisdictions it feeds. Ten months after graduation, 64 of 82 graduates (78.0%) held a job requiring bar admission. 3 took federal clerkships. The largest single destination was South Dakota with 46 graduates, followed by Iowa with 5.

University of South Dakota has been approved by the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education since 1923. It is a public school based in Vermillion, SD. No first-year students left for academic reasons in the reporting year. 1 students transferred in from other law schools.

The full 509 record

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 University of South Dakota 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.