you get what you pay for, or do you?

throughout college as an architecture student, business and economics classes were not a requirement for my degree. however, i decided my very last semester it couldn't hurt to try one out, so i chose the broad topic of "macroeconomics." after a semester of GDPs and endless parabolic graphs supposedly representing supply and demand relationships, i concluded with the broad analysis that econ sucks. primarily this opinion stems from the fact that a large majority of the "greeks" in my econ class would graduate college with a starting salary much higher than any architecture graduate can hope for and they certainly won't have to include the word "intern" in their job title for 4 years (minimum) after they've received their degrees. did they ever suffer through 3 days of no sleep in studio building tiny little parti models or coloring layer upon layer of one square inch on a prismacolor drawing? i think not. so why is it that architecture graduates are so under-appreciated? i've yet to find a happy little intern architect working steadily away at their bathroom details content to be bringing home a salary among the lowest of graduates with professional degrees. so why do we do it? we complain about the recording of every 15 minutes of every day for 4 years to wait 4 months to qualify to take/pass 9 tests to wait 4-6 months to receive our licenses. we complain about the hell we went through for 5 years trying to obtain a degree in the first place and of course we complain about the lack of actual design in so many of the projects we work on. so what is the payoff of being an architect? is it the rewarding experience of seeing a budget cut, value-engineered building completed? is it that when you tell people you're an architect, they kind of look at you like, wow, that's really interesting. (even though you can see them secretly filing that information away in the back of their mind so in the future if they need a new house, you'll be sure to give them a discount). or is it really finding the art in that one project that has an endless budget out of the hundreds that are stretched so tight the architecture is squeezed right out like water from a sponge? yeah, that's it i guess. i momentarily forgot when i received my paycheck that is nearly half of my engineer husband's, but now i remember. it's all about the "art". who needs to pay their bills?