And I’m aware that medical debt is a big issue, but it seems like a chicken-or-the-egg type problem. Of course you can charge $500k for a medical degree when the doctor can make it back and then some in 5-10 years.
It’s funny, because it’s a career that feels both overpaid and underpaid to me. I went to a college where almost half of the students were going for nursing - and you certainly don’t need to be especially intelligent.
At least to an outsider, some nursing fields seem damned easy. The nurse that sees me before my GP? Pretty easy job.
Other specialties? Like the nurses that needed to clean up my wife after she massively bled during/after a c-section and they had to give her medications that also caused all sorts of other fluids to intermingle with the blood? Or the nurses that had to stand there for 10 minutes squeezing our infant daughter’s heel in the NICU to try to get enough blood out while she screamed as hard as a little baby can?
$100k doesn’t seem like enough. Odd occupation. For $60k I’d rather work at Costco, that’s for certain.
if a "senior" software engineer can make half a mil, and an electrician can make 200k, of course doctor pay are high.
who is going to take 10-15 years of school and debt otherwise?
> "The electricians that I interviewed and met two months ago in a data center in Plano, Texas, all under 30 years old, all making $240,000 to $280,000 a year, all with as much overtime as they want, none with any debt, all three of whom were poached three times in the prior 18 months," Rowe said ...
Google AI summaries then pick up wealth/finance grifter social media clickbait about it and parrots it as a fact.
There are contract data-center electrical jobs paying $55-65/hr (some with signing bonuses, per-diems, and benefits on top), but they only come close to $200,000 takehome by working 12/7 with generous overtime. And these are 5+ years of experience, OSHA 30, journeyman license, bring-your-own-tools. They're also exceptional; most are still $25-40/hr.
It's really easy now with Claude and GPT5; just ask them a question and tell them to answer it for you, with cites, from the NHE. (The data I argue from precedes widespread LLM research; I built a site for this a couple years ago and didn't bother to update my data, because I assume it didn't get much better.)
https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...