Recent numbers suggest that for the first time since the 1997-1998 academic year, applications to law schools have declined -- 4.6% last year and 9.5% so far this year. There are probably several different potential reasons for this decline:

They suggested that in an improving economy, college students may prefer jobs to law school, or that rising undergraduate debt loads have discouraged some students from borrowing still more to pay for a law degree. It may be that a surge in popularity a few years ago has, perversely, led to the current decline in interest in law schools. . . .

In the 2003-4 admission cycle, the number of applicants hit 100,600, according to the Law School Admission Council. The biggest increase occurred in the 2001-2 admission cycle, in the wake of the dot-com bust. The number of applicants -- 95,800 in the 2004-5 admission cycle -- is still far greater than it was 10 years ago, when about 75,000 people applied. . . .

[F]ewer people may be applying to law school because more are applying to medical school. . . . Medical school applications rose in 2005, to 37,364 from 35,735 the previous year, according to data collected by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Most likely, these trends are part of regular up-and-down cycles of applications that generally coincide with the general state of the economy, as different observers quoted in the article note. Nonetheless, it is food for thought that perhaps the high cost of education, in this case getting a law degree, is shutting out people who would normally have applied.

In other words, is this an emerging shift that primarily serves to benefit the already-rich over the middle class?