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The bottom of the law school market just keeps on dropping.

Enrollment numbers of first-year law students have sunk to levels not seen since 1973, when there were 53 fewer law schools in the United States, according to the figures just released by the American Bar Association. The 37,924 full- and part-time students who started classes in 2014 represent a 30 percent decline from just four years ago, when enrollment peaked at 52,488.

The recession was in full swing then, and many college graduates looked at law school, as they have many times in the past, as a sure ticket to a good job. Now, with the economy slowly rebounding, a growing number of college graduates are examining the costs of attending law school and the available jobs and deciding that it is not worth the money.

“People are coming to terms with the fact that this decline is the product of long-term structural changes that are just not going away,” said Paul F. Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado’s law school. “It’s kind of a watershed moment.”

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A year of tuition can cost $44,000, even at schools that are ranked low on the U.S. News & World Report list. A diploma at a top-rated school, like Harvard, will cost an additional $10,000 or more annually.

That would seem a worthy investment if the job market awaiting new law school graduates looked more promising. But the bar association’s employment figures are dismal. In 2013, fewer than two-thirds of newly minted lawyers had found jobs that required passing the bar exam.

Part of the problem is that jobs that once required lawyers — for sifting through documents before a trial, for instance — are increasingly being automated. Do-it-yourself services, like LegalZoom, are gaining popularity with consumers.

“There’s also outsourcing,” Professor Campos said. “India has millions of people who speak English perfectly well and they can handle basic legal work. The only segment of the market that isn’t affected is the elite firms, the Wachtell Liptons of the world. But that represents a very tiny slice of the market.”

The downturn in enrollment has had some effect on the margins of the business of law school. Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School laid off more than half of its faculty over the summer. There has been talk of some law school mergers, too.

But given the deterioration in attendance, what strikes many in law school academia is how modest the response by law schools has been thus far.

“In any other industry, there would be consolidation, more reductions in work force, but we don’t do those things,” said William D. Henderson of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. “Students see the debt they will need to take on, but they don’t see the product changing. We still train people in the artisan craft of lawyering that is in decline.”

Fewer people are taking the admissions test and applying to law school, according to recent data from the Law School Admission Council. The number of test takers was 8.1 percent lower than a year ago, and about 50 percent below the same test period in 2009, according to council figures.

The realities of legal education become clear each December, when the bar association releases statistics from law schools, which are accredited by the bar association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the bar. The schools are required to post their data on their websites by Dec. 15; the bar association also posts the information online.

The overall picture shows that 119,775 law students — both full- and part-time — are currently enrolled. That is 8,935 fewer than in the fall of 2013, and 17.5 percent fewer than in 2010. The total enrollment, the association reported, is the lowest since 1987, when there were only 175 accredited law schools.

This year, 127 law schools, or nearly two-thirds of them, had smaller first-year enrollment than they did a year ago. But 69 schools had larger entering classes this fall than a year ago, as some schools have expanded their cross-disciplinary offerings and others have lowered tuition or increased scholarships. To tackle the growing issue of the cost of legal education, student loans and debt loads, the bar association formed a task force last spring. The group, led by Dennis W. Archer, a former Detroit mayor and former bar association president, will also examine issues like scholarship awards and conditions and discounting tuition.

There are some optimists about the future of the profession, however. Some law deans argue that the country needs more people studying law, not fewer.

The financial model can be overhauled, said Nicholas W. Allard, dean of Brooklyn Law School, because “there is a large and exploding unmet demand for lawyers to meet the upcoming challenges in a host of areas like health care, bioengineering, international commerce, government relations, housing, elder care and digital security.”