Instead of making more things that fewer and fewer people want to pay for, one thought would be to eliminate some of those things. Are there law schools that should disappear? “Maybe. But how is that going to happen?” asks Al Brophy, a law professor at UNC. “Will it happen because places say voluntarily, ‘hey, we aren’t making money, so we should shut down?’”

Schools will not volunteer for their own demise, Brophy says, partly because so many people—alumni, faculty, staff—have a strong interest in keeping the end at bay. “It is going to take a lot to have schools shut down. What I think we are going to find is that they are going to be able to operate on shoestring budgets.”

Bilek, the U-Mass law dean, says she will continue to focus on preparing students for the careers they want, even if they stray outside the standard path for lawyers.

“I don’t want law schools to get away with pretending students can get jobs that they can’t get,” she says. She also doesn’t want the only measure of a school’s success to be the number of people it places in traditional law firms.