My brother is mechanical engineer with a PE degree. He told his kids to become doctors. And you don’t have to be a very best software engineer to make more money then mechanical engineer. A BS in CS makes more than MS with PE in Mechanical engineer, more opportunities, more flexibility. Honestly, there is no such thing as passion in engineering, an overuse term. You like or dislike the field.
I think you’re blindered if you think upside for a MechE major who goes out to work (at least for a few years) as an engineer is lower than for a lawyer.
So, just as a clarification for the purpose of this discussion–are we assuming both being at the top of their field? A 5th year say DA in Los Angeles, probably makes in the low 6 fix figures. A 5th year associate at one of the top firms say in NYC/Chicago/San Francisco makes right around 230-250k, not including potential bonus.
@RMIBstudent , if you look at this link, you can get a good idea of what different types of engineers earn:
http://www.mtu.edu/engineering/outreach/welcome/salary/
Also, if you do a search in your desired city for first-year patent associate positions (or even lateral patent associate positions), you will learn what types of engineers are more sought-after. My sense is that there just isn’t much patent law around mech-e these days, or there are more mech-es who are also lawyers than they need based on the amount of work coming in.
Note, however, that engineering majors do not have to stay engineers.
The only folks I know who make good money without having to work crazy hours all came from a quantitative/STEM (or accounting) background. Giving that up when you actually like it does not make too much sense to me.
My husband has close to 40-50 patents, often he had to help the lawyers write up the technical part of his patent. But he is in research group and so there is tons of patent work. He has a PhD in EE, but most of his patents are software related, not even EE.
So you’re willing to give up your passion for engineering because you did well on a practice test?
First of all, one should never overhaul their entire career plan simply because they did well on a standardized test.
Second of all…money isn’t everything. Seriously. Mechanical engineers have a median starting salary of around $58,000, which feels like piles of money when you’re 22 years old and fresh out of college (trust me: I made substantially less than that, and in Manhattan no less). The mid-career median salary is $93,600, which is plenty to live on comfortably in most locales with a family. You also won’t have crushing law school debt and an uber-competitive market to contend with, plus the specter of billable hours, which does NOT sound fun.
Harvard Law grads do have great median salaries (around $143,000 starting out, and over $236,000 mid-career) but also have crushing debt (3 years at Harvard Law would cost you around $255,00 at current prices, and tuition rose 5% since last year. So the cost could be closer to $300,000 by the time you attend).
I think a lot of students on CC overestimate how much money is necessary to live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. The salary of a mechanical engineer, even just starting out, will put you in the top percentiles of single earners. Unless your desire is to live a really wealthy life where your kids go to expensive private schools and you summer in Nantucket, but there are other ways to that kind of lifestyle besides BigLaw. An engineer could get an MBA from Harvard in less, with less debt, and go onto make a similar starting salary - but still be working in engineering and technology, your passion.
Not to mention that the hours are insane and the hourly wages of a lawyer even in BigLaw (if you are fortunate enough to end up there) wouldn’t be better than that of an engineer. And that’s if you can even keep up 80 hour weeks week after week (many burn out and would leave but for the huge debt they have to service, leading them to hate their life).
And that’s not even taking in to account the progressive tax code. In after tax dollars, your hourly earnings as a lawyer may be less than as an engineer.
Adding to the great points made by Juillet and PurpleTitan above:
As I’ve long said, it’s not 2.5 times as hard to pay off $250,000 in law school loans as it is to pay off $100,000 in law school loans; it’s about five or ten times as hard.
The math on law school makes almost no sense when you have to pay $30,000 after taxes in loans every year for at least ten years. All the money that would have gone to either paying down the principal of your loans faster, or saving for a house or retirement, is going to… paying off your loans at the regular rate.
The other factor is that when you work long hours in a law firm, you are paying people to do stuff for you that people who work normal hours do for themselves, and you have a lot of costs that other professionals don’t have. Yes, you should wear nice suits that don’t come from JC Penny’s; yes, you should drive a nice car in case clients are in it; yes, you are going to be outsourcing your cooking, housecleaning, car maintenance, home renovations, grocery shopping, and errand-running. There are a lot of ways that adults can use their time to save money, and conversely, when they don’t have time, they end up spending a lot of extra money.
Those big salaries don’t come because you’re fabulous; they are there in part to compensate you for the costs of working there.