Of course you would think that the lawyer's huge salary would perfectly balance the high cost of education and it could but there's a huge caveat to this. If you look at the average salary of a lawyer, it does not sound like that big of a hurdle to pay off your student loans in the short term. However if you take a closer look, you can see that there seems to be two pay scales. There is an elite group of newly graduated attorneys that get the highly competitive and sought over jobs and there are the rest that earn from $40,000 to $70,000. But when you take a look at a longer time frame it is a lot more manageable so be sure to see this as what it is: a long term investment.