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Lumping your comparison to include people without high school degrees with lawyers is making a huge mistake. At a minimum the comparison should be between collage graduates and lawyers minus the opportunity cost of law school.

Consider, when comparing starting salary your accountant or whatever not only makes money in both years a lawyer is in law school they also likely have two raises before the lawyer gets his first paycheck and start paying back undergrad loans while a lawyer is still adding interest and new debt.

If your opportunity cost from loans, tuition, lost wages and delayed carrier advancement adds up to a conservative 10k/year after taxes for the rest of your life, then your 72k pre tax lawyer is actually making the equivalent of ~58k pre tax and 1/2 of starting Layers are doing worse than that.

Also factor in cost of living and rent. That ~$72k is not going to fly in SF or NY after rent if you are trying to start a family and not have 3 roommates.

I don't see how this is relevant. Of course lawyers must make more in a HCOL to make ends meet, but how is this different than any other profession? Are there significantly more lawyers in HCOL areas?

The demographic you refer to are renters because their debt to income ratio is not sufficient for a mortgage. After going to law school, having to scrape by and pay back student loan debt + HCOL rent is how you are entering your adult life with a law degree. Your entry level salary is still depressed relatively speaking to an entry level software dev in HCOL area. If your spouse is not the breadwinner you are in trouble.

I still fail to see the reasoning here. Most other young professionals are in the same boat: debt out of college, smallish starting salaries, renting, HCOL areas.

Lawyers have higher salaries than most other professions, though. They are 10% better paid than software developers. We have a huge amount of really well paid developers in SF, Seattle and NYC, and lawyers still have a higher median salary.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/mobile/lawyers.htm

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Thanks I see where you are coming from. All things considered you can make a great life out of a law career if you are driven and motivated, like you said the ceiling is much higher for law than general population jobs

not everyone who's a lawyer can be an accountant and vice versa.

Sure, but the job was irrelevant substitute librarian or anything other than unemployed and the opportunity cost still exists. IMO, the comparison is still quite generous as it ignores risks associated with trying to become a lawyer.

> 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage.

I'm not sure what source you're using, but no, it isn't even double the median US salary ($56k): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school.

Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sources, so I guess it depends on where you look. Regardless, you're correct in your overall point, I just wanted to point out that a $100k salary does not necessarily make it worth going to law school.

With that said, you're right: if your goal is to go into law to make money, it shouldn't be very difficult earn well into the six figures a few years in. I imagine most competent lawyers earning less than that are working in public defense or a similarly underpaid aspect of law, knowing the tradeoff. For reference, the median salary for software engineers is only $110k, but that is clearly on the low end of what a competent engineer can make after even just 5 years in the industry.

That’s “Annual mean wage” not median wage.

Oops, you're right, I completely misread. Thanks! In any case, I'm finding a lot of conflicting data, so at best I think the actual number depends on where you look.

>> Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year

The number I want to see his how much their salaries increased after law school, what they made over and above their pre-lawyer income. At law school I ran into many students who "earned" lots of family money prior to school. Some were on trust funds but other had token jobs in family firms. One of the top earners in our class was a guy hired immediately by his father's firm, but I think he was already some form of on-paper employee with them prior to law school too. Other people came from relatively stable jobs prior, only to struggle to find work afterwards.

There's a problem with your post: you linked to "median lawyer pay" but many graduates will not get lawyer jobs. Median lawyer pay doesn't include folks with a law degree who went back to whatever they were doing before law school.

The vast majority of folks earning “high five figures” don’t have to waste three years on dubious education at a cost of $50k per year (not including debt for living expenses because you can’t work your first year at all). So you’re right, high five figures could be a great salary if you’re a manager of a target and didn’t go to law school, but it’s a bad salary if you had to go to law school to get it.

There are a lot of people with 4 year graduate degrees (with same cost) that earn less.

Right. And those are bad too.

Source?

$45k is right on the median for a college graduate.