"The profession is dying," says one frustrated contributor to legalweek.com's Talkback section as the debate rages over the dearth of pupillages available to Bar students. "Why has it taken so long for a committee to be established to deal with a problem that has become progressively worse over a span of many years?" asks another.

To be fair to the Bar Council, it has been agonising over this issue for a long time. In 2002 an independent inquiry recommended imposing a levy on barristers to help fund needy students through their training. It was shot down by an angry profession that resented being asked to stump up for what it regarded as somebody else's problem.

The dilemma is easily spelt out. Each year nearly three times as many students undertake the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) as there are pupillages available. They do this at great personal expense in the hope that they can pay off their debts once they begin practising. And yet most students fail even to get an interview, let alone secure one of the coveted pupillage places up for grabs. In the bad old days, the Bar Council sidestepped the issue by simply restricting the number of BVC places available. Given the type of people who were getting on the course – white and middle class – this exposed it to claims of racial discrimination.

The Bar was obliged to usher in a free market for BVC places, thereby handing people the right to blow money they have not got on a course that will lead them into a culde-sac. This may sound overly dramatic, but it is depress-ingly evident from many of the comments posted on legalweek.com's Career Clinic that a would-be lawyer's fate is pretty much sealed when they get their A-level results, no matter how well they do in their subsequent studies.

And yet, just occasionally, through sheer determination or by dint of good luck, people without the right academic qualifications do defy the odds and succeed in becoming lawyers. If the Bar were once again to attempt to impose restrictions on the number of people taking the BVC course the door would be permanently closed to such people.

There is a radical solution to the problem. It would be to recognise that the Bar is simply too small to maintain an equitable qualification regime. Currently, the safest option for a would-be barrister contemplating whether to pay for the BVC would be to qualify into the solicitors' profession, with the option of transferring over to the Bar at a later stage. A common training scheme for qualification into both branches of the profession would simply recognise this state of affairs, thereby securing the Bar's long-term future.