The statement is inaccurate, or at the very least overgeneralized. My personal experience = husband with a PhD in high energy physics, highest tax bracket (through hard work, not inheritance), and an effective tax rate in the teens.
If I thought high energy physics Ph.D. could obtain "highest tax bracket", I would have probably pursued that rather than a legal career. But we all make financial assumptions when strategically planning our career arcs.
In fact, that would probably be much easier for me than law, being that it was actually an area where I had actual talent.
In fact, given what I know now, I would basically never have made any of the major life choices I made. But that's life. You only tend to know how to make choices, or what those choices really mean, when it's too late.
Physicians are relatively secure due to the structure of their guild.
