Don’t take offense at the question if you are a doctor or a lawyer. It is going to be more nuanced than the title alludes.
Under old-school thinking, a forward-thinking lady should marry either a doctor or a lawyer because of the social benefits and guaranteed income those provide. Today, most of new doctors entering the field are women or nearly so and a very significant portion of the lawyers are as well. Both careers traditionally provided good income but the commonalities break down from there. Becoming a medical doctor in the U.S. requires intense study from a very age to even hope to be able to make it into medical school at all and that is just the beginning. You have years of residency and insane hours for years after that.
Becoming a lawyer in some capacity isn’t nearly as difficult. Most above-average students can make it into some law school and eventually pass the Bar exam if they persist. In other words, it is much easier to become a mediocre lawyer as opposed to a doctor although I believe it is equally hard to rise to the top of either field.
That is just background for the real question. Why are those professions still the ideal even today? Many lawyers struggle to find any employment at all and the idea of a high-flying lifestyle are just as much a pipe-dream as the first day they entered undergraduate school.
We are in the information age where IT professionals routinely make as much as many doctors and most lawyers (a few are the wealthiest people of all) yet I don’t hear about many parents telling their kids to find someone who is an information technology wiz and ride the gravy train from there. There are also petroleum engineers who make the highest average pay the earliest out of all professions you don’t hear about them either.
What is it that makes law, medicine (and sometimes banking) a more prestigious and attractive career over other alternatives when some of the others pay more and offer a better lifestyle?
They are the only professionals a working class (and especially immigrant) populations encounter on anything like a regular basis and so they remain the “goal” for people trying to break into the upper middle class. I mean, what does a recent immigrant with a 8th grade education know of business consulting?
I’d really question whether lawyer is at the top of most prestige ratings. I think it’s more commonly seen as a career you get into if you want to make a good living rather than a career you enter in expectation of public approval.
As for why these careers are more popular than other careers that offer better prospects, it’s probably a show business issue. There are lots of movies and TV shows about doctors and lawyers. There are relatively few about bankers or engineers.
Most lawyers don’t make as much money as people think they do.
As for high-paying jobs that don’t require a specialized degree like law or medicine, there’s a reason why you don’t see many investment bankers over the age of 35.
That is actually a pretty good answer and I think there is something to that. Even college undergraduates don’t usually know much about the range of jobs that are out there and how much they will eventually pay. All they know is that they can keep going and apply to graduate, medical or law school using the same strategy they have always used until that time. The other paths aren’t nearly as user-friendly or straightforward.
I think it’s more than that: the path to CPA or EE are pretty straightforward, as well, but, IME, not nearly as common a long-term goal among kids from impoverished backgrounds. It’s more that when everyone you’ve ever known with a nice car and good clothes was a doctor or a lawyer, you tend to think in those terms.
I’d rewrite this as “Most lawyers don’t make NEARLY as much money as people think they do.”
I have no idea why lawyers are still a respected profession. I’ve dealt with lawyers, mostly grads within the last 10 years, who are only marginally literate. I don’t understand how they got through undergrad, much less law school. Yes, they generally flame out within a few years, but they do a lot of damage in the process, and there’s always more take their place.
Are we talking prestige as defined by an upper-middle class sense of socioeconomic and professional elitism?
I suppose the answer is in what professions do people earn more and require more education than lawyers and doctors that aren’t a) highly speculative b) sales driven or c) viewed as an esoteric pastime for socially awkward nerds?
Keep in mind, people don’t look at the average or likely salaries. They look at the maximum potential salaries. A partner in a large Manhattan law firm can make over $1 million a year.
And if you think about it, the same really goes for non-professional jobs. If everyone you know who owned their own house was a cop, electrician , bus driver or mechanic, and you don’t know any mason tenders at all , you’re probably not going to plan to be a mason tender.*
my son applied for an apprenticeship program, and although I know many people in various trades, none of them knew what a mason tender did. Because apparently only the masons they assist have heard of them, and I don’t happen to know any masons
a) Many of others to some degree. See the number of lawyers today that can’t find a job at all let alone a high-paying one. You would be better off being a Java consultant even if you aren’t especially good. There are solid skills in other fields that can always be sold consistently.
b) Sales always pissed me off because that is the true route to lots of money and a decent lifestyle. I work with them in the pharmaceutical industry now and a job requirement is a gym membership and closet full of pumps plus plenty of smarts. Most of them burn out early and the women get discarded after they age out unless they make it into one of the madam positions for new recruits. It a good life while it lasts but that usually isn’t more than a few years. A few of them, usually men, do quite well over their lifetime however.
c) This one gets to the heart of my question - Good doctors and lawyers are as nerdy in their range of knowledge as any other profession. Knowing how to build a successful e-commerce site from the ground up is considered admirable but not especially sexy while knowing how to handle corporate merger proceedings is. Why is that? You were an engineer yourself? Why isn’t being a petroleum engineer or even a CPA as prestigious in popular thought if those positions pay more and offer a better overall lifestyle than many other jobs.
I think people look at the part of the iceberg they can see, not the part below the surface. Prestige is a fickle and silly thing and perceptions of income earning capacity likewise.
If 1000 IT consultants make $100k per annum and 950 lawyers make $90k per annum but 50 lawyers make $600k per annum, then the popular perception will be that lawyers make massive amounts of dough and IT consultants do not.
Similarly, while most lawyers probably do relatively unprestigious work, there are a significant number of high profile lawyers who are judges, prominent trial lawyers etc and the latter is what people see, so that’s what creates the “brand”. Other professions may do great work but many lack the publically visible high flyers.
Hell, I’m a college drop-out who was working on a history degree. That’s about as useless a degree as you can have.
But my last job before I retired? The guy who was my assistant had a law degree.
Degrees only mean something for about the first two years after you leave college. After that, you’re being judged by your job performance and nobody cares what you did in college.
There is certainly something to your viewpoint but there is something missing as well. Information technology is a good example although I don’t want to single the IT profession exclusively. Some IT professionals don’t just make $650K a year, a very few make that in a day and earn more overall than anyone in any profession bar none. They can make more than any doctor, lawyer, entertainer or sports star at the top of the field yet it is still considered a profession for ‘nerds’.
Why is that? I think that anyone that is at the top of any of the high paying positions has to have nerdiness in some form to excel at what they do.
IT isn’t the only high paying profession with good, steady prospects even at the mid-levels that is unappreciated however. Engineers tend to do relatively well as do CPA’s and some specialties pay off greatly with just a bachelors degree.
You won’t ever see people doing those jobs on a TV sitcom however. They usually have architects (with poor pay and job prospects overall relative to education), lawyers, doctors. or sometimes research scientists (again with poor pay and job prospects all things considered).
The question is why the popular conception hasn’t caught up with reality over the past 50 years?
Because a workplace drama about programmers and accountants would be pretty boring? Law and medicine both have potential for high stakes drama.
Honestly I don’t think there is any more to it than it being an old stereotype, and there weren’t any programmers around when people came up with it. Both professions are old and have a long history of being prestigious and socially valued.
In reality, I don’t think it actually causes women to flock lawyers and avoid CPAs. Furthermore, in both cases it’s further qualified. Surgeons and top big city partners are seen quite a bit differently than small town GPs and ambulance chasers.
I don’t get it either. Being a physician means you will work long hours, have tons of stress and a lot of debt. The suicide and alcoholism rates among doctors are higher than average. Plus the career is full of burnout. These stereotypes came into existence when those were the only 2 jobs that were obtainable to the masses that offered prestige and income. The fact that law (or getting an MBA) doesn’t offer those things now, or that new fields have come up hasn’t sunk into the collective consciousness yet.
nearwildheaven Why aren’t there investment bankers over the age of 35? Is it burnout or what?
Well, there was Cosmo Topper of the old Topper TV sitcom. And the side-character Mr. Mooney the banker from I Love Lucy. And of course George Banks of Mary Poppins fame.
They all tended to portray bankers as very stuffy doltish people. The theme of all those portrayals was an attempt by everybody else to get them to lighten up. For example, bursting into a refrain of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious always helps.
I think there is a subtlety that you are missing. The IT professionals that earn the very big bucks have, by and large, left the world of being an actual IT professional and have entered the world of big business ownership and entrepreneurship. People don’t see the Gates’s and the Zuckerbergs as IT professionals. They aren’t making their money from acting as a professional (per the dictionary definition) they are making money through owning a large business and/or selling a product. The days when they wrote code are long behind them. The guys who are actually writing code or directly supervising them are on a salary. It may be a very decent salary but nonetheless salaries for working IT professionals top out pretty quickly IME.
Contrastingly, there is a very broad band of extremely high income lawyers who are actually “on the tools” or directly supervising those who are. Top city lawyers around here earn between $500k and $2M PA and while they are business owners, they are also people who are actually sitting down doing legal work every day. I’m not sure there are many IT or engineering professionals who would be the same.
These are jobs that are going to take a couple decades to get to, and of course, not everyone who graduates with a Computer Science degree is going to get there. But I don’t think it’s true that salaries for software developers really top out all that fast.
So you can get almost as well paid as a medium paid partner in a city law firm in Brisbane, centre of the legal universe (snerk), as you can get being one of the top paid engineers in the top three richest software companies in the centre of the IT world?
Well, maybe, but I guess I’m not sure what your point was. My point is that pay for top engineers (and these are just individual contributor jobs, and probably not the very top at that - you can do much better as a top manager or starting a business) is quite high, and doesn’t really start to top out until you’re at least a couple decades in. If your point is that those roles pay around the same as a median lawyer, that’d be a pretty good answer to the OP. But, while I don’t know a whole lot about lawyer salaries, I find myself doubting that that’s actually the case.