There has been an ongoing debate over the health of the employment economy over the past 20 years. That being said, there are still many high-paying jobs up for grabs out there. A recent study from Glassdoor showed the 25 highest paying careers in America. Almost all these jobs will not be available to high school dropouts, and most require years of advanced studies.

The number one, highest paying career on the list is a physician. The second highest was an attorney. It turns out that lawyer have a median base salary of $144,500, while physicians have a median base salary of $180,000. While one makes more than the other, these are just median pay reports.

24/7 Wall St. wanted to examine what the role is here versus qualifications, time spent in school, would-be student loan debt and some other issues. Keep in mind that some physicians and some lawyers make vastly more than the median salary.

Should the question be if it is fair that doctors make about 25% more than attorneys, or should it be whether it is fair that attorneys make about 80% of what doctors make? We are not breaching that, but there have been economic studies and social studies on the matter over the years from both sides of the coin.

Becoming a physician takes years, and the average student debt for doctors coming into the workforce full-time is somewhere close to $170,000. Many doctors going to school full time do not get to actually be practicing doctors into their early 30s. It can take additional years to get into highly specialized medicine.

Becoming a lawyer generally requires three years of law school, after getting an undergraduate degree. Forbes ran a report late in 2014 showing that the average debt taken on by public law school graduates was about $84,000 — or just over $122,000 for private law schools. Without weighting the number of public law school seats versus private law school seats per year, let’s just split the difference and call it close to $100,000 in average student debt.

Glassdoor showed that there were almost 1,000 job openings for attorneys. There were over 2,000 job openings for physicians.

But what about the demand and the needs that the United States has now and in the years ahead? Analogies about there being too many lawyers have been plentiful for years and years. At one point the old wives tale was that there were more law school students than there were practicing lawyers. The reports about a current shortage of doctors are often dwarfed by the reports of the doctor shortage that has been projected for the next decade or two.
After digging deeper into the Glassdoor report on the nation’s highest paying jobs, 24/7 Wall St. noted the following for each profession.

Concerning lawyers:

The value of a law degree has been recently questioned due to the high number of law school graduates relative to job openings. Perhaps as a result, law school enrollment has fallen in recent years. Still, the demand for legal services will likely remain steady in the future, as the BLS projects growth for lawyer occupations in line with the national average. Due to the high level of education required, lawyers are also very well paid, trailing only doctors in starting salary.

About physicians:

Like law professions, doctors and physicians have been among the most highly-paid and respected occupations for some time. A typical U.S. worker starting out as a physician earns $180,000 annually. The growing population of elderly Americans is expected to only accelerate in coming years, a trend that will increase the demand for physicians and other medical practitioners.

Another consideration here is malpractice insurance. This is thousands of dollars per year either way. Doctors and lawyers have different rates that vary greatly from state to state and from field to field within law and medicine.

Doctors can pay into the tens of thousands of dollars per year, with an obstetrician generally having the highest malpractice premium of them all, as delivering babies is a high-risk and high-cost proposition.

Lawyers can also pay thousands of dollars per year in malpractice insurance. This depends on whether they are employed or self-employed. It also depends on their field, their income level and what level of personal assets they have to protect from potential malpractice suits.

One reason 24/7 Wall St. wanted to look at this comparison is that doctors and lawyers have had contention among each other for many years. That’s just part of life now.

At the end of the day, the Glassdoor median physician pay is about 24.5% higher than attorneys. The path and cost of the two are rather different, and it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, based upon the years of school, the potential debt and the vast array of fields within medicine and law.

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