Recent trends indicate that more and more college students are bypassing careers in the traditional realms of medicine and law in favor of less conventional but increasingly high-paying and well-respected careers in management consulting, entrepreneurship and Internet start-ups.

Applications to medical and law schools have recently experienced significant declines. The Law School Admissions council reported a 5.2 percent decrease in law school applicants in 2005 and a 6.7 percent drop in 2006. Medical schools have experienced similar declines since the late 1990s, although recent fall-offs have been less severe.

Even within the law and medical fields, professionals are gravitating away from the more conventional careers. According to a Jan. 6 article in The New York Times by Alex Williams, firms are losing an average of 20 percent of their associates annually. Twenty percent of those who stay will experience depression during all or part of their career. Sixty percent of doctors polled in 2006 said they had considered giving up medicine because of “low morale.”

Medicine and law have always been characterized by long hours and tough exams. The migration away from these jobs is not a result of these stringent restrictions, however, but is due to shifting attitudes about the professions. A fat paycheck, financial security and hard-earned degrees are no longer the only measures of a desirable job. Creativity, innovation and risk-taking are becoming more sought-after elements in the high-profile job world.

Bill Gates was one of the first famous, high-profile entrepreneurs to make his fortune starting his own highly successful business. Others have followed in his footsteps. Both Google and Yahoo! were founded by imaginative and quirky students whose companies are now some of the biggest and most lucrative in the world. Salaries at these Internet giants often soar above those of doctors and lawyers.

While high salaries will always affect the career decisions of top college graduates, more and more students are searching for careers that both pay well and are enjoyable. Today’s college graduates are less concerned with financial stability than their predecessors and more concerned with applying themselves to a career about which they are passionate.

The American dream has always been about working hard to achieve success. The new dream, however, seems to be not as much about logging the long hours as it is about finding a career that offers excitement, room for creative thinking and spiritual completeness.

This is the first of two editorials inspired by Alex Williams’ Jan. 6 article in The New York Times, “The Falling-Down Professions.” The second editorial, which will examine these issues from a gender perspective, will be published tomorrow.