To pre-meds reading this who are looking at going into medicine as a purely economic decision, it's actually not that bad a prospect.
To preface this discussion, let's hold aside matters like whether practicing medicine will leave you a miserable husk of a human being (I didn't particularly care for internal medicine
) and focus only on numbers.
Let's assume you go into anesthesia. Relatively easy to match into so a fairly safe bet and makes a descent income after. In your first four years out of college you loose ~$200k, then make ~$50 for 4 years. Net total, even minus interest, let's say -$30k total. Each year after, you make $250,000. Leaving out inflation and assuming a 35 year career, that's $8.72 M lifetime earnings in today's dollars in your career.
Compare to an average engineer who doesn't get into management (the vast majority of work-a-day engineers). You make $60k coming out and gradually work up to about $120k after 20 years assuming steady promotions. For ease of calculation, let's say you get a $20k raise at 5 and 10 years. Over the same 42 year timeframe, you make $4.74 million unadjusted for inflation.
Now let's take a management consultant who makes it to partner. Now here's the kicker, I used to work as a management consultant, and stats at my big 4 firm showed only 1 in 20 people made it to partner. Even so, let's check how the numbers work out. 2 years as post-BA associate at $60, 2 years of business school at -$60k, two years of post-mba associate at $120k, three years as project manager at $200k. 7 years as principle at $300k then on average, 26 as partner at, oh let's go, $750k. $22.4 M total, a clear winner. However, remember, there is only a 5% chance of you getting to this point.
For big law, the numbers work out about the same (maybe like 25% higher at earlier career phases) with also about a 5% chance of making partner. For finance, just double all the numbers.
However, let's say you get booted out of consulting and to the regular business world. Usually, people leave for a job making about as much money as they were while consulting, and more or less stay there. Some people work there way up the corporate food chain to become CEOs and so forth, but that is the vast minority of people, a percentage too low to mention. Equivalent to the amount of super-successful entrepreneurs.
So if you get booted at post-mba associate, total lifetime earnings $4.6M. Booted as project manager (about a 33% chance of making it that far) $7.4M. Booted as principle (about 10% chance of making it that far) $11.3 M.
Total expectation value from going into consulting: $6.5 M.
Finance becomes more complicated because if you leave/are fired, you generally leave for significantly lower paying jobs, and I've killed enough time on this already.
So in sort, in my head, assuming promotions work based solely on random chance, the expectation value of lifetime earnings from going into medicine is great than that from going into other fields with less security.
However, if you think you are that magic person with special interpersonal skills that can take you to the higher echelons of those fields, then taking the gamble is probably the way to go.
And if you really want to the live the high flying dream and go entrepreneurship where the distribution goes from $25k for a lifetime to billions, or if you think you have what it takes to become a CEO of a fortune 500 company, have a fun ride. A different kind of adventure than medicine, but one non-the-less.
Or you can say **** the whole amount of money you'll make as a 56 year old thing and go enjoy your life. Whatever floats your boat.
Jake2 has spoken
PS. I don't want to hear anything about the god damn time value of money. Unless you have been making 10% a year interest on your investments for the last ten years, don't expect to do it again in the future. Learn to live with Bank of America's 1.5% saving's account rate or whatever it is.
If you think that's what you will get in consulting, you're in for a rude awakening. Maybe when you're a partner that will happen. But only a tiny, tiny number of people become partners. It takes a lot of smarts, political skills, networking, buttkissing, very good luck, etc to make it. Even if you become partner, you have a lot of stress of hitting your numbers and managing multiple projects.
