Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
> Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.
It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.
> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.
