There’s been no shortage of hand-wringing over the high cost of a law degree, but it turns out that hefty tuition prices aren’t a major factor in where aspiring lawyers opt to enroll.

That’s the takeaway from a new paper examining whether rising costs impact the number of people who apply and enroll in law school. Author Amy Li, a professor in the University of Northern Colorado’s department of leadership, policy and development, found that not only is there no correlation between lower costs and the number of applicants and matriculants at individual schools, but that increased costs correlate to higher enrollment at many private law schools. Put another way, enrollment tends to get bigger when schools charge more for tuition and fees, counterintuitive as that may seem.