As law school enrollment continues a four-year slide locally and across the country, Toledo attorney Randall Dixon didn’t have any trouble coming up with a topic for his first column as president of the Toledo Bar Association.

“Don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers” went the headline on a piece that posed the question, “What do you tell people about pursuing a career in law?”

“There are folks right now that are saying if your job prospects are already lined up, so to speak — if you’re going into a third generation law practice, for example — you might feel a lot better about the investment and your job prospects,” said Mr. Dixon, himself a third-generation partner in his family’s firm. “I’ve seen that statement made: The more certain you are of your employment, the better.”

Last week, the University of Toledo, whose law school took the biggest hit in the state this year with a 25.9 percent decline in first-year law students, announced a 13 percent reduction in tuition in an attempt to reverse the trend.

UT law school Dean Daniel J. Steinbock said he believes tuition costs, the resulting debt, and the less-than-promising job market for new lawyers have combined to create an overall decline in people interested in law school.

“When the crash happened in late 2008, it caused a lot of legal work to dry up, and some of the biggest firms in the country either laid off associates, delayed people they had made job offers to or paid them off to go away, and then they started hiring fewer lawyers or stopped hiring,” Mr. Steinbock said. “This was at some of the biggest firms, and it had a trickle-down effect, especially during that period when there were many more law school graduates than there were decent jobs.”

All nine of Ohio’s law schools have seen applications and enrollment drop since law school enrollments peaked in 2010.

Ohio State University, which has the largest and highest ranked law school in the state, has been the least affected, although applications were down from 1,512 a year ago to 1,398 for this school year. The first-year class was 6 percent smaller — from 178 last fall to 167 this fall.

By comparison, UT’s law school has seen a stunning drop: from 1,440 in 2011 to just 475 this year. It enrolled 157 first-year students in 2010 and just 80 this fall.

Mr. Steinbock dismissed the idea that UT’s ranking as No. 140 in U.S. News and World Report’s annual law school ratings for 2014 played a part in its declining enrollment.

Outside the top-tier law schools in the country, he said, “I don’t think there is a direct relationship between ranking and applications and enrollment. Studies have shown that rankings are one factor in the choice of law school but not the only one — cost and location and the individual qualities of the school are equally important.”

Case in point: Ohio State’s law school is ranked No. 31, yet it still has seen some declines. Ohio Northern University in Ada is unranked but has not experienced dramatic drops in enrollment.

The only Ohio law school to show significant gains this year was Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, although its 43 percent increase in first-year students came on the heels of steep declines in the previous years.

The departure of a scandal-plagued dean a year ago was followed by a recruitment blitz that involved faculty, alumni, and two interim co-deans appointed to lead Case’s law school.

“We turned things around,” said co-Dean Michael Scharf. “There was a change in leadership, and the faculty and the students and the alumni basically went into crisis mode and worked all of our collective tails off to bring in a better class and a bigger class.”

Ohio’s smallest law school — Ohio Northern University — offered students a nearly 25 percent reduction in tuition this year.

Still, applications to its law school were down from 515 last year to 465 this year. First-year enrollment dropped slightly, from 77 to 71 students.

Law school Dean Rick Bales said it’s hard to gauge the impact the tuition cut has had at the private school, whose “sticker price” is $24,800 a year.

“I’m not certain that it made a big difference in the number of applications we received — they were down a bit this year, so if anything it might have helped it not be worse,” he said. “I don’t know that, but I am certain that it convinced more students who we admitted to attend Ohio Northern.”

The small university in small town Ada appeals to students interested in what Mr. Bales calls “county seat practice.”

“Many of our students aspire to go back home and work in the county seat of the county they came from,” he explained. “They tend to come from relatively rural counties and, not surprisingly, they feel very comfortable in Ada, Ohio.”

There are jobs for them, Mr. Bales said, adding, “I think a lot of it has to do with being honest with students about the jobs that are available today. We’re not trying to sell our students on $160,000-a-year jobs at big firms on the coast.”

And many students who apply to law school have other aspirations.

Paulette Bongratz, a Toledo native who earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from UT, said she worked for a year before deciding to enter law school at UT this fall.

“I really wanted to pursue a law degree because I want to go into a nonprofit and use [my law degree] in ways that will help people,” she said.

With an undergraduate degree in international business and marketing, Ms. Bongratz, 24, said she hopes a law degree will enable her to work with church groups and other nonprofit start-ups, including those doing work overseas.

Anna Haffner, a first-year law student at ONU, said she had no intentions of becoming a lawyer until she developed an interest in the issue of sex trafficking. She decided a law degree might be the tool she needed to work on behalf of victims.

A native of Tennessee, Ms. Haffner, 23, said she applied to several law schools while in China where she spent a year teaching after college. She landed at Ohio Northern, she said, because of the price tag.

“Scholarship was actually more important than price,” she said. “They gave me a very good scholarship that covered almost everything.”

Not all students are so fortunate.

In its annual report on law schools, U.S. News and World Report said that 94 percent of the 2013 ONU law graduates had incurred some debt, with an average indebtedness of $103,031. At UT, 88 percent of the 2013 law graduates incurred debt at an average of $99,889.

Statistics from the National Association for Law Placement put the overall employment rate for all 2013 U.S. law school graduates at 84.5 percent, continuing a six-year decline. In 2007, the employment rate for new lawyers hit a high of 91.9 percent.

The bottom line: fewer college graduates are looking to law school because they don’t want to make a hefty investment that may not pay off in a high-paying job.

“I think it’s happening throughout higher education,” said Wendy Margolis, spokesman for the Law School Admission Council. “Undergraduates too are having the same issue. A lot of folks amass a ton of debt as undergraduates and then have to pile on more for law school, and that’s daunting.”

No part of the country has been immune, she said, although top-tier law schools such as Harvard and Yale continue to attract high numbers of applicants.

Ms. Margolis said the recession prompted a very short-term boom in college graduates opting for law school in 2009.

“In the past when we had an economic downturn, people would look at it as they’d go to law school and hopefully they’d get a better job when they got out,” she said. “That pattern just hasn’t held.”

According to the Law School Admission Council, which administers the Law School Admission Test, a record 171,514 people took the LSAT during the 2009-10 school year. By last school year, that figure had plummeted to 105,532 — the lowest number since 1998.

Registrations for the fall LSAT, which is to be administered later this month, are again down, Ms. Margolis said.

She said there are law jobs out there for new lawyers who are flexible about relocating to underserved communities and willing to work for lower wages.

“There is a big Baby Boomer retirement on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to replace all these people,” she said, adding, “The people who are really driven and super committed to being a lawyer and have been all their lives will find a way.”

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-213-2134.

First Published September 21, 2014, 4:10 a.m.