Many people nationwide have lost their jobs during the past few years because of a down-swinging, post dot-com economy.

Fear of being laid off, fired or not being hired at all has prompted more graduating students to attend law school to specialize their degrees, thus increasing their chances of gaining employment, a recent Kaplan survey said.

Penn State's Dickinson School of Law is bracing for this surge.

"Registrations for the October LSAT (Law School Admission Test) are well ahead of last year's pace and my somewhat murky crystal ball suggests that we should end up with an increase somewhere between 11 and 17 percent," said Barbara Guillaume, director of admissions at Dickinson School of Law. "Students might be experiencing a reduction in opportunities presented to them after graduation when the market goes into a downturn."

The economic downturn Guillaume refered to is the collapse of what financial experts call California's second gold rush — the dot-com economy.

Tom Matos, director of admissions at New York Law School, explained that the correlation between the dot-com shakedown and the rising number of applicants to law school.

"As the economy gets softer, for those who are recent college graduates of undergraduate schools and who don't have job security and who have had in the back of their minds an escape route, law school is fairly high up on the list," Matos said in an interview with The New York Times last month.

According to a survey by the Law School Admission Council, about 24,000 people took the LSAT in June, an 18.6 percent increase nationally from the previous year.

In the Northeast region of the survey, which includes the Dickinson School of Law, the increase is 21.7 percent with 3,930 test takers, the highest in the country. Nationwide, applications into law school have increased 5.6 percent from last year.

Mark Roberts, professor of economics at Penn State, said the layoffs of previous years are not as much of a threat to graduating students.

"There will always be a demand for people with computer skills," Roberts said. "The economy fluctuates. Decisions to go to secondary schools are affected by the job market. If there isn't a job available, it is natural for people to stay in school longer."

Many of the Internet companies that went broke because of poorly thought-out products lost their popularity within a few years. Their web sites made little revenue from advertising and soon, they crumbled, Roberts said.

"How long it takes for the market to recover depends on technology changes, demand for products, companies spending on new technologies. Those cutbacks will continue until demand for their products recovers," Roberts said.