Definitely plumbing school > JD.
Mistake I made when I was seventeen, giving two shits what industry median salaries are. If you’re not average and have a little luck, it means very little.
My lifelong friends:
B.s. business hacksaw - clears 600k - software sales
Jd mba hacksaw - 300k family law practice
Jd hacksaw - 400k works for large mining company, compliance.
High school dropout - 150k bartender and real estate
High School grad - 500k+ built a trucking company.
Md - 550k radiologist
B.s. business hacksaw financial sales national head- pushing 2mil
Petroleum engineering b.s. - 1mil runs geomarket for small international oil field service company.
Electrical eng. B.s. $250k lighting and power design
B.a. English - cargo pilot $250k
All approaching mid career. All public schools in America. All conservative numbers. Doesn’t include beanies.
My point. Do what you want…median salary be damned. And don’t hang around losers.
You state in your reply you have a survivorship and selection bias in your evidence ha ha
“And don’t hang around losers.”
My points are about probabilities of outcomes, not possible outcomes. If we were using anecdotal information, we can determine college is meaningless because of the notable drop outs on the Forbes list. But all reasonable people know that this decision does impact the potential of achieving certain income outcomes. I agree with your point about medians and their limits, but they are not meaningless when making life altering decisions involving tremendous amount of student debt.
I agree with don’t hang around losers. but that means you need to work hard and most likely get into a top school whre you are surrounded by ambitious hard workers. But your hard work makes it more likely you will do well anyway.
I made no mention of student debt.
Offshoring (not outsourcing) will impact entry level jobs for most professions, not just legal jobs. The fact the state licensure is required to actually practice law in the US means that there is at least some barrier not found in many other industries.
There’s obviously an excess supply of lawyers right now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the trend will continue. And it’s kind of silly to look at lawyer starting salaries when lawyers can’t even practice law right out of law school. They have to pass the bar and all that jazz. Long-term trends are more meaningful. According to glassdoor, the national average of (reported, so possibly skewed) attorney salaries is $150,000. That’s not horrible.
Yes, if you’re average. But if you possess traits that throw you in a different distribution, don’t pay too much attention to the one you see on AF or in your guidance counselor’s office.
If I went to law school, salary surveys would be meaningless given my background.
That’s a lot of friends for a guy who posts on an internet forum.
Law = BO
Respect.
And I’m going skiing with three of them in January. You’re right though. I doubt one of them posts on the internet. I’m the wack job of the group for sure. They’re too busy with real lives. Sad, I know.
+1
And college is too expensive for you to attend just to “find yourself”.
Unless a degree is an express condition of your job, or your major his ighly technical (engineering, architecture, hard sciences), I’d think long and hard about whether I wanted to go to school.
You’ve put your finger on the absurd irony at the heart of this forum…
Unless you have JD CFA you are hacksaw
Yea, but my perspective is solely based on the debt. If you have a free or near free ride for law, then it’s really just the lost income. And that’s ok. But I know people who spend considerable money in student loans to go to hacksaw colleges, just because their family thinks that lawyers make good money. That’s my beef.
And I agree about the starting salary limitation. I assume the distribution remains similiar but shifts to the right and probably gets a little more skew, but I can’t find data on that.
i haven’t met too many CFA JDs
I met a Navy Seal CFA a few years ago — that’s definitely above CFA MBA
^ Greenie?
greenie was marines, not navy
He jumps out of a flying airplane strapped with a BA II Plus
The special forces jump with 12c’s
I’m working on doing it.
Worked in asset management, then went to law school, and now practicing in securities litigation. I take L2 in July. Will eventually go back to asset management.
There’s still money to be made in law if you work hard and are willing to move where there aren’t too many lawyers. I have friends who have left the big city and arenow killing it at their own firms in small and mid-size cities in the Carolinas. Marketing is key…
I don’t disagree that it’s a bad investment in many cases (so is going to a private liberal arts college to study photography). But you might be overstating the debt from a hacksaw. I checked to in-state tuition of one of my state’s hacksaw law schools and it’s about $45k over the three years. That’s only tuition, but if you can live with your parents or something in the meantime, that’s not really too terrible. Especially if you can get some scholarship money.