Grumpwurst - I know exactly the type of lawyer/doctor you're talking about in your former post. ; I have plenty of colleagues who assumed massive amounts of debt ($150-200k) in three years of law school. ; I faced a similar option when I chose my school: ; either attend a "lower name" school for free or attend a top 15 school for $50k/year. ; If I attended one of the lower name schools, I'd have to fall within the top 5-10% of my class to have a shot at any BigLaw jobs; at the other school, I could (not entirely sure on this) graduate anywhere in the top 50% in the class and have a job in BigLaw. Sarah was still in school at my undergrad, which was also the lower name free school, so the decision was a lot easier.
The law is no different between the two schools (at least I hope not!), and I ended up happy I chose the lesser school because I realized I had no desire to be a BigLaw attorney. ; While they start at $95-175k/year, they also work 60-80 hours/week. ; I have absolutely no desire to work that much (When do you spend that money? ; When do you see your family? ; It would entail trade-offs I was unwilling to make). ; Conversely, I have offers that are less than those amounts, but have no minimum billing requirements, and range in weekly workloads of 35-40 hours. ; Sure, my friends who have accepted offers from those firms have started to buy a lot of nice things now, but I wonder how happy they'll be in a few years? ; Without reading the book, I'm betting that's what makes lawyer/doctors worse off?
...boy, has this thread gotten derailed from the original discussion of ND filters. ; Still, very interesting!