[ghaff]

>A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.

I went to graduate school at a college that had a primarily liberal-arts oriented undergraduate curriculum and I knew a lot of people who graduated with their liberal arts degree and ended up going to law school after finding that their degree wasn't really setting them on the path to a successful career. Not universally of course and a number of my friends did quite well for themselves with just their undergrad degrees but those who did didn't really follow particularly conventional career paths.

So for a reasonable number of people I knew, law school functioned as this sort of default career path for liberal arts undergrads--though a fair number of them didn't stay in the profession long-term.