If you view the expense of going to college and professional school as an investment, the pay off is somewhat poorer in medicine than in some other professions. Tracking the fortunes of graduates of medical schools, law schools, and business schools with comparable entering grade-point averages, he calculated that the annual rate of return by the time they reach middle age is 16% per year in primary care medicine, 18% in surgery, 23% in law, and 26% in business. Not bad on the whole, but the differences are there.
