Students looking to go to law school next year may have a more challenging road ahead of them than their peers applying to other professional schools.

Officials from law schools across the country are reporting a boom time for applications, while their counterparts at medical schools and business schools say their numbers are holding steady.

As recent college graduates look to avoid a bleak job hunt and the recession forces more professionals to change careers, applications to graduate and professional schools — especially law schools — are increasing, making admissions to professional programs across the nation more competitive than in years past.

The University’s Law School is following the trend, with the number of applicants up 20 percent from last year — the largest percentage increase in seven years — at 3,000 this year, according to Sarah Zearfoss, assistant dean and director of law school admissions.

Zearfoss said she believes the recession over the past year and half is a major factor driving this increase in applicants, a trend she also saw during the economic down times in 2001 and 2002. The Law School saw a 30-percent increase in its applicant pool between those two years.

“My anecdotal belief is that there are a lot of people coming straight through (from undergraduate school) and believe they won’t be able to get jobs,” Zearfoss said.

The University’s Law School, ranked No. 9 in U.S. News and World Report’s Best Law Schools, currently gets about 6 percent of all applications to law schools nationwide, a number that has increased both as the national pool of applicants has gotten bigger and as the University attracts more law students, Zearfoss said.

Though the increase in applicants this year is currently at about 20 percent, Zearfoss said she expects that number to go down to 10 percent by the Feb. 15 application deadline.

With the increase in applicants, admission to the Law School will be even more selective this year, Zearfoss said, though the admissions office will not change its overall approach to reviewing applications.

“We’ll be applying the same general criteria and be choosier about who we admit,” Zearfoss said.

The Law School’s acceptance rate is about 20 percent, but it is expected to go down for this year, as the admissions staff aims to maintain the class size, Zearfoss said.

Though the University Law School’s jump in applications mirrors a national trend, it is to a much higher degree than at other colleges across the country.

According to preliminary end-of-year data from the Law School Admission Council, the number of applicants to American Bar Association law schools is up 5 percent over last year. The data also show that total applications are up 6.5 percent, indicating that applicants are, on average, applying to more schools.

A rising interest in law school applicants is also evident in the number of people taking the LSAT exam, the test required for admission to law school. During the 2008-2009 academic year, there was a 6.4 percent increase in the number of test takers, according to the LSAC website.

The University of Illinois College of Law has experienced an even larger increase in applicants than Michigan, with a 44-percent increase from this time last year, according to Paul Pless, assistant dean for admissions and financial aid at the University of Illinois.

Pless said he thinks this increase will be sustained throughout the entire admissions cycle and by the application deadline in March there could be a 30- to 40-percent increase from last year.