I realize that this isn't quite what you were getting at, but I think its a little too much to put undergraduate cs degrees on par with lawyers and doctors. The sheer amount of material that you absolutly must master (and not learn as you go along, as many of the really good cs majors seem to do) in the medical and legal professions put it them squarly in a different, higher catagory. Not to mention the fact that I think people in general rely much more heavily on doctors and lawyers than computer programs (I mean if the word processor doesn't work, c'est la vie, there's always the typewriter, but if the pacemaker isn't put in properly there isn't much to fall back on). I would think that a better comparison here would be between typical cs majors and registered nurses and legal assitants. The education levels and the understanding of the subject matter is about on par with each other.
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I realize that this isn't quite what you were getting at, but I think its a little too much to put undergraduate cs degrees on par with lawyers and doctors. The sheer amount of material that you absolutly must master (and not learn as you go along, as many of the really good cs majors seem to do) in the medical and legal professions put it them squarly in a different, higher catagory. Not to mention the fact that I think people in general rely much more heavily on doctors and lawyers than computer programs (I mean if the word processor doesn't work, c'est la vie, there's always the typewriter, but if the pacemaker isn't put in properly there isn't much to fall back on). I would think that a better comparison here would be between typical cs majors and registered nurses and legal assitants. The education levels and the understanding of the subject matter is about on par with each other.