Law Graduates Face a Tough Job Market - WSJ.com Forum

[Anonymous User]

Medicine is one thing I've never wanted to study, but I am curious about it.

You know how you get doctors making bank who went to unknown med schools? Is medicine like law and business, where you need to go to a top 10 school or whatever to make it big? Or you're guaranteed money no matter where you go, as long as you work hard and are competent?

Also, I am surprised the MBA is seen as a get-rich-quick scheme. Are you talking about the top 7 schools here? What exactly do MBAs do to get rich - just become middle managers?

[savesthedayajb]

The days of doctors making bank are over.

[confusedball]

Is medicine like law and business, where you need to go to a top 10 school or whatever to make it big? Or you're guaranteed money no matter where you go, as long as you work hard and are competent?

Medicine is not at all like law or business. This is because there are only 100 or so medical schools and each has about 100 people per class, so there is no such thing as a TTT medical school. Furthermore, unlike law and business schools, medical school is not the terminal stage of professional education. There is residency. Your score on the medical boards (USMLE Step 1 and 2) are the most important in determining where you go for residency, not your school reputation nor your grades (grading standards vary a lot depending on institution). So in this sense, medicine is a lot more meritocratic than law or business.

There is also a prevailing attitude that getting into whichever medical school is often an arbitrary process (since most schools have admission rates under 5%), so one cannot begrudge someone much for going to a lower ranked school. State med schools also have significant tuition savings, so many high-caliber students opt for their state schools and then ace the boards.

Does reputation of medical schools help? Of course, but I think a regression study was done on this and it was found that school reputation was number 6 or 7 down on the list of factors that residency programs consider, below board scores, clinical grades, recommendations, research and publications, honor societies, etc. In other words, not very much. If you want to do academic medicine and become a tenured professor, then reputation of medical school comes slightly more into play, but that's also primarily a factor of correlation. Of course academic medicine pays generally less than private practice anyway.

Pretty much every American MD school has the same distribution of residency placements (little under half in primary care, 15% in surgery, and the rest in other specialties). Where they vary is in the research focus of their graduates. The compensation of say a general surgeon varies primarily by geographic region and malpractice premiums in a given state (tort reform or not), not by med school or even residency reputation.

One way to level the playing field a little more for law schools is to have law students take the bar before graduating and let biglaw firms see the precise scores before recruiting. This might encourage more people to not mortgage their future on a T14 school when they could have gone to a much cheaper state school with an equally good education.

[Anonymous User]

The days of doctors making bank are over.

Is this true? Is there any info to back it up?

Anyone know, realistically, salary projections for biglaw vs. medicine? Or in other words, "upper-end of lawyers" vs. "upper-end of doctors"?

[confusedball]

The days of doctors making bank are over.

Is this true? Is there any info to back it up?

Anyone know, realistically, salary projections for biglaw vs. medicine? Or in other words, "upper-end of lawyers" vs. "upper-end of doctors"?

Here's the 2009 salary medians for physicians:
http://www.cejkasearch.com/compensation ... survey.htm

Full-time, competent doctors should make at least as much as a biglaw associate, while biglaw partners with equity probably make more than the vast majority of doctors (and biglaw lawyers). Specialists and surgeons make more than most biglaw associates.

It's hard to predict into the future, but primary care salaries are not going to get any lower, while some specialties like radiology (people who read Xrays, MRIs, CTs) might see a 10-20% pay cut since there is political pressure to limit superfluous diagnostic tests. Radiologists make $400k now, so a 20% pay cut is still $320k..