Don’t sign up to be an RN until you look at how many LPNs are being hired instead of RNs. This isn’t new, when I graduated with a biochemistry degree and was considering nursing school I was told not to bother unless I could be a physicians assistant, nurse anesthetist, or get a masters. The market for 4 year RNs was very soft then and the premium shifts are competitive. Many hospitals do not approve overtime anymore. It’s not as easy as this makes it sound.
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I made $55k starting salary with a 25% bonus my first year in IT consulting and that was nearly 15 years ago. It’s not peanuts, but it’s not horse owning money either.
At least not for those of us who didn’t happen to discover drilling rights in our yard.
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Thinking about the professions of people at my barn and other friends who work FT and seem to have the funds to go to a fair number of shows. Pharmacist, including one who had moved into management. Realtor. Escrow agent. Mortgage broker. Lawyer. Engineer (actual rocket scientist). Flipping real estate. But, in the interest of full disclosure, many of these people have spouses who are helping to pay the day-to-day expenses. Also several of them have work or travel obligations that limit their time at the barn, though it helps that the barn starts teaching lessons as early at 7 am.
The four-year degree that probably gets you the most in terms of money and an interesting job is some sort of engineer. But this is not a good choice for someone who dislikes math and science. Some of the financial management companies also recruit math and physics majors, so there’s that as well. We lost a physics faculty member to that.
You can easily hit low-six figures after a number of years teaching community college in these parts. It’s easier to wrangle your schedule with no research required, the pay is better than at many four-year liberal arts schools, and many of the courses are offered at non-traditional times so you might be able to get a schedule that is all or mostly late afternoon and night. Unless you have a meeting… I suspect that many of the salaries people are seeing for teachers include summer school and pay for extra projects. When I looked at the website for California, I think the highest-paid person in our department taught every winter and summer schedule and basically signed up for any project with a stipend. But the OP apparently doesn’t want to teach.
Someone once told me that any career worth doing is going to have a pay-in period where you are going to need to put in a lot of time and effort, which may preclude a lot of horse time. I helped to plan a new science building and the temporary village we erected after an earthquake, and coordinated the moves. I didn’t ride much for about a year, but I didn’t volunteer for Saturday chem boot camp after that either.
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Notice that there’s no set scale for raises? Our district starts at $55k. After 30 years, you can end up at $98k. That’s barely keeping pace with normal inflation.
I live in outside of Albany. There definitely are quite a number of districts in this area that have teachers making 6 figures.
In NY at least, teacher pay is roughly equivalent to other public servants who have similar education/experience. E.g. Teacher with Master’s degree and 10 years of experience makes a similar annual salary as mid-level public employee (Senior Budget Analyst, for example) with a Master’s and 10 years of experience.
I’m not sure if that’s the case elsewhere; I think it’s a fair comparison. Different schedules (e.g. 10 month v. 12 month) but annual income is similar. I wouldn’t choose summers off to teach 4th grade…so the schedule, in my opinion, is not a factor. I’m a little jealous of my teacher friend who only has 22 days left in the year…but her classroom is not something I would ever want. From what I hear…she deserves the summer off.
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Sacrilege!!
There you go being all rational. 
