Snooker wrote:To be realistic, most good professions have these issues: low starting salaries, hard to get your foot in the door, crushing hours at the "elite" level. From my experience in health care, I can tell you a medical technologist* takes two years to train, half fail to get jobs, and those who get them will earn in the mid-30s. Many have college degrees. Nurses can make good money, especially if specialized, but the stress they're under conjures stories of biglaw (except that demented patients occasionally assault them), and they burn out and totally leave the profession at alarming rates. I don't know as many physician assistants, but if it's anything like nursing, it's a shitty prospect as well.
Doctors require 4 years of med school, and then your starting salary is a princely $40,000 (2/3 of law), which we call "residency". If a Doctor does residency for 3 years, then works for 100k for 3 years, he'd have made 220k to pay his debts. A lawyer starting at 55k for 2 years, making 60k another 2, and 65k another 2 will have made $365k over the six years - 50% more than the doctor, with 2/3 the debt!
When I bring up the trials and tribulations of lawyers, health care people LAUGH at me. Put it in perspective. Lawyers, even TTT grads, are social elites. Any median student at a JD institution will out-earn, by around 15%, the median student of a similarly ranked MBA program. But the lawyer unemployment rate rarely hits 1%, and when it does, we call it a recession.
What does this tell us about the legal profession? First, half of you are morons for attending TTT schools charging 40k a year when there's plenty of schools charging 10-15k at the TTT level. Second, our attraction to the legal profession has made us a bunch of whiny whores who don't know a good deal when we have one.
*Anyone who operates medical equipment on behalf of a doctor, especially in medical imaging.
You're excluding the fact that for the class of 2014, just under 60 percent of all law school graduates became lawyers. I'm sure all the unemployed/underemployed law graduates would love to think they are part of the "social elite", but when you have a six-figure
negative net worth without a job as a lawyer, it's might be hard to feel "elitist".
I don't think you're going to have a hard time finding a "job".
