[ska]

Your analysis is sloppy on several fronts.

1) Medicine and Law are professions, programming is not. You could arguably compare to CS professors, but that's still apples and oranges. 2) It doesn't make any sense to compare (peak, median, whatever) yearly salaries when you have wildly different career paths (e.g. 0 years of school vs. 10+) , debt, etc. What you want is lifetime earnings. 3) Lawyers in general don't make anything like what you think they do. Doctors distribution is also lower than your range suggests.

You are right that some of these professions offer, for a smallish number of people, a clear path to a solid upper middle class salary (and few options outside of that).

[cableshaft]

Regardless of the reality (which everything I've seen concurs with what you've said), there are a ton of people making decisions for school that are influenced by media, parents, etc. that keep telling them that the safest career path is doctors and lawyers. That's starting to change nowadays, but only just.

I still regularly hear people talk about how cushy and rich all lawyer jobs supposedly are.