Actually even that is not correct.
It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and come with higher social respect, especially in America.
Obama wants to boost STEM; however the policy-makers and educators fail to understand the competitive disadvantage of "home-grown" industry vs. foreign ones; today, scores of Chinese and Indian PhD candidates and post-doc's are willing to take less pay and more hours for a shot for a green card in US and the respect of academia/engineering accorded to them in their culture.
Compare that to an average American engineering undergrad student, who on hand sees that his fine arts/humanities peers are getting laid and party more often, his law/business/medicine peers having greater potential financial payout and the opportunity to manage the engineers down the track - all the while he's suppose to be fretting all night long about problem sets. What a gyp!
Sad thing is US society used to reward engineers who invented things and businessman who actually created things instead of MBAs and marketing exec's - downfall of any great civilization comes when the focus of society turns from production to finance (see Holland, Roman Empire, Great Britain and US). There's still a few opportunities though in engineering to make good money, IMO just don't drink the startup culture kool-aid and always do your own thing.
Law school was not hard. At an elite school, it's very easy to get B's in your courses, which won't get you on law review, but will generally land you a job at a top firm from an elite school. Failure rates are astoundingly low. I would guess 97+% of the class gets a B or higher, and failing out is almost unheard of (again, at elite schools). Lower ranked schools, from what I've heard, do grade on the harsher scale you mentioned.
My PhD program at Berkeley, on the other hand, was a horror show of attrition and failure. It was so much more brutal than law school it's completely silly to compare the two. My dept at Berkeley said that 40% fail to get the PhD, but that's not counting people like me who were awarded masters degrees and so are considered to have achieved their degree goal. I'd guess that the failure rate is well above 50% - and keep in mind, this is for a very elite program that is extremely selective.
Graduate programs in math, science, and engineering are littered with the broken dreams of exceptionally smart people. It's exceptionally unusual for med, law, and mba students to fail out at elite programs. It's commonplace in top PhD programs.
Funny thing is my husband did his UG in ME at Berkeley and that department ( and the College of Engineering in general) was a sheer nightmare. The unimaginable things that took place and the workload he endured (while working 20 hours at LBNL) blew my mind and that was just a BS. I can imagine a PhD would be insane.
But my point wasn't that one is harder, just that law is hard and it's not an easy thing to grasp because they ask you to learn and be tested in a way that is very non-traditional, at least in my experience. It makes babies out of people who thought of school as a cake walk. It was actually funny at times to see the emotional breakdown over their first B or C because they were so dramatic about it.
But I commend you on your choice to leave law school, probably smartest thing you ever did! ha.
It was something about the presentation and the sheer vast number of seemingly unrelated rules and regulations. I realized it took a special constitution to digest that stuff. I think I could have gotten it, but I would have had a lot harder time than I did learning about parsers or some other CS-y thing.