AMEN.
I’m still thinking about this and I just wanted to add, I know it’s very difficult to hear a lot of this, especially if you’re extremely Type A like I am and can’t imagine being happy or fulfilled if things don’t turn out exactly like you dream.
I just wanted to add that I could never have imagined where I am now five years ago. I was hardly even considering the career I have now, and I was only dreaming of riding as much as I am. Life works itself out, one way or another.
I should add to this conversation that my very successful side hustle is “flipping horses” and what enabled me to make that my side hustle was a biochemistry degree and taking time out to build a lucrative career that gave me time to ride.
I occasionally get on a sales horse for fun but I get to own tons of nice horses with no pressure. If one speaks to me I will keep it. If not I get to own the kind of horses I could never afford if I were the rider or the barn owner.
Ymmv.
First: very, very few people actually know what they want to do with their life at 17. I wasn’t even sure going into my postdoc. Yes, almost everyone thinks they know what they want, but just accept from older people who have been there/done that: you don’t even know what you don’t know at your age.
Second: If you’re interested in being in an equine related business, I’d highly suggest going to the best school you can easily afford and doing a business or accounting degree, then an MBA.
Third: Honestly, the people I know who enjoy horses the most are people who do it as a hobby. The physically grueling aspects that invariably come with the job will wear on you as you age. And I mean mid-twenties, not something far distant. But of my “horse friends”, most are real world professionals and adore riding when they can, some seven days a week, some once a week.
I agree with pretty much what everyone else said.
In IHSA, I believe anyone with any major can join the equestrian team; the IHSA program is independent of major. Your riding level will dictate where you are on the team. Many schools have IHSA programs. You’d get more valuable experience, I think, working as a working student for a good show barn. You could at least spend your summers doing that. One pro I know who didn’t come from money (many have) spend about 3-4 years as a working student and then went off on her own in the same area, with blessings from the pro, and runs her business out of someone else’s farm. That said, you’d have to really think about how you are going to open up your own barn, how you’re going to attract and keep clients, how you’re going to purchase a rig to haul your and maybe other horses to a show, how you’re going to afford liability and other insurance, etc. Unless you have money in hand and/or are a Tori Colvin, it will take you a while to get these things. Honestly, those who don’t have access to money usually can’t easily afford their desired lifestyle showing horses.
STEM careers provide decent pay and you can try to have your horse business on the side. Reality is, though, that many STEM jobs are not 9-5. A straight business degree will help you set up your own business and I think they are more 9-5. I think you should take some time to really think about what you like doing or are interested in, besides horses. And realize that having a dream is good but at this point, you might enter college and after your first year want to do something entirely different because of the classes you took.
If you’re a coming senior, take time this summer to contact as many trainers as you can and ask them how they got to their position. Most won’t answer you but some will.
Some people who have businesses have it on the side of their real career. One is admin/fundraising for a university and has her eventing business. Another whittled down her nursing career to 2 days/week and has a dressage business. She doesn’t give up nursing in case something happens to her that she can’t ride for a while / or anymore.
Like others said, can you take a gap year and be a working student at a reputable barn? Also, like others have said, burnout in the horse industry is a real thing. A fall-back career is great. I can honestly say that as a high-schooler, your world will greatly expand in college. If I were you, I’d do a 4 year degree if you can. Like others I don’t think have said, you can always continue to ride in college. You can do free leases on horses especially if you have skills. You’ll graduate when you’re 21, and those 4 years will go by so fast. If you want to really dig into a training business afterward, absolutely nothing will stop you. You might decide that you’d rather flip horses on the side or develop and show your own horse. You might decide flipping horses doesn’t make much money and you’d rather make solid money by teaching and showing. You might decide there are other things in life that you like better and are content to develop your own horses.
Give yourself the time and space to figure out the realities of launching a business that provides enough income that you can “easily afford [your] lifestyle”, and to figure out what you can do to have a lucrative day job and run your business on the side. And like I and others have said, you may find after college that you have zero interest in running a horse business! You’re just 17!
Good luck!!
It’s been said already but I’ll reiterate this for emphasis:
Pros in the hunter/jumper/equitation world are not interested in equine related college degrees. They care about skill, show records (at the A/AA levels), and who you’ve worked and/or ridden with. This is still a trade industry, and the reality is any equine degree won’t get a horse crazy person in the door if that’s the only thing that person has to their name. Those schools still have to cater to and educate people with zero horse experience who wake up one day and decide to go to school for horses. Think that doesn’t happen? I had two in my class. And I had been riding/ training/working in barns since i was much younger. The degree classes were PAINFUL going at the speed of the beginners in the program. That’s why horse pros don’t respect the degrees.
I know you stated you’ve trained “countless” horses, but to what level? I agree with others that if you don’t have results in the 3’+ (preferably 3’6") at the A rated shows, it won’t get you clients. It probably won’t even get you an assistant trainer gig at an A circuit barn. The only clients an equine degree usually get you are non-horsey parents looking for up/down lessons for their kids, who don’t know better and assume a piece of paper like that actually is valuable in this industry.
I learned all that from a member of the US Show Jumping Team. To this day, it is still one of the most painful yet important pieces of advice I ever received. I ended up in a pro riding career anyway after graduation. I initially took it as a “temporary” gig while I looked for what I hoped would be my real career in equine journalism or legislation. Three or four years later I was physically broken from rank horses, tired of dealing with clients, dirt poor with no equity, and lost my passion for horses. It took two years totally away from the horse industry to get that love back.
All that to say: you build credibility in this industry by riding, working, and training with the right people with the right names, and getting tangible results…NOT through a degree, no matter what the school tells you. So if you want to be a horse pro, you have to start from the bottom with a reputable farm and work your way up. If you want that, take that gap year and work your tail off. Work for a good pro, learn more than you would in an equine degree, AND get paid for it (even if minimally). Don’t shell out tens of thousands on an equine degree.
Otherwise, get to school and study something that has real value.
I don’t know anyone, not a SINGLE person, that was helped in any significant way by their equine degree. In my opinion they’re one of the biggest scams out there. The successful pros I know who graduated from those programs would have been successful without the degree. I know many many many more kids who were under some impression that the degree would help them become a rider/trainer only to realize that potential employers don’t care at all about the degree and now they’re teaching up-down lessons, being a barn manager, or working entry level jobs out of the horse world.
Here are your options
Graduate college with an equine degree and massive amounts of debt, start looking for assistant trainer/rider type jobs. These jobs do not pay well, which means your student loans will greatly limit the positions that you can accept. The connections you made in college may help you get interviews but those positions will overwhelmingly not care about your degree but will care about how you ride. You will have ridden IHSA for four years (while I do recommend IHSA I don’t know anyone who’s riding improved significantly, or at all, while doing it) but you do have the option to work over the summers to gain significant experience and greatly improve your riding. You can now take horse shows or entry level low wage jobs for the rest of your life.
Graduate college with some other degree and less/no debt. Apply to the exact same jobs as in situation 1 and be able to afford almost any type of working student/intern type position you wish. You will be coming in with the exact same riding experience (IHSA + any outside leases, jobs, etc) and may be the better applicant if you’ve been riding nicer horses more frequently. You can now take horse jobs or jobs related to your major, if you choose. You can also throw away your degree and never look back.
It’s a no brainer. Get a “normal” degree.
I won’t reiterate what others have said, but I’ll just throw out another vote for the non-equine degree. It was painful watching my friends spend their days riding and running barns and building their equine businesses while I was studying and working in the lab finishing my doctorate, after having to retire my horse early due to time constraints. But now I have an extremely portable advanced degree that pays well, which means I have a nicer horse than all of them (admittedly, they each have several low grade* horses), and take several lessons a week (that they struggle to find money and time for), and compete (quite successfully, and without too much financial strain) at levels they may not reach. Having disposable income from a non-horse job is the best thing I ever did. I love riding because it’s my pleasure, not my work. And there is a clear place in the competitive world for the “talented amature” - you’ll stand out more, and for the right reasons, than the “mediocre professional” (if that matters to you).
I agree with others that taking a gap year to work as a working student might be very informative. And consider what happens when you get older and, god forbid, you get seriously hurt? How will you make a living then? (On that note, you should also get disability insurance.) Being a trainer is a tough life. You’ll live on thin thin thin margins.
(*note: nothing wrong with low grade horses! My friends’ riding horses/quarter horses/lesson horses are admittedly far more versatile by many measures than my princess warmblood who is afraid of her own shadow lol. But damn if she isn’t really good at prancing!!)
I want to double down on this statement, which I think is excellent advice.
You have had 17 years worth of your dream and your passion. That isn’t nothing!
But with any luck you will have another 73 years or so on this earth, full of different dreams and different passions. Horses may be part of that. Horses may remain the most important part of that. The way horses factor into that might change over time- right now your passion seems to be in training horses, and who knows, in 20 years you might decide that what you really want to do is breed youngsters, or rehab horses, or open up a retirement farm and love on some geriatrics. (The latter is my life plan should I ever win the lottery.) Or you might decide you want to keep training, until some rowdy youngster bucks you off, and then you need health insurance and something to do with your life while you rehab. (Read Nicole Mandracchia’s blog post on COTH this morning- Nicole is a very good rider and horsewoman who went to Centenary and bolstered her resume with working student positions at some excellent farms. She’s a great example of someone who worked her butt off to make her dream a reality, but she’s also forthright about what that reality looks like.)
You have your whole life ahead of you. Give yourself room to grow.
actually if you are paying $15/hr the business’s cost is over $16.20/hr as the business is responsible for 6.2% Social Security tax as its match and 1.45% Medicare Tax contributions… plus any Federal unemployment taxes (FUTA) and
State unemployment taxes (SUTA)…so make that about $18/hr rather than $15/hr
and now back to a career in horses
Take this summer, next summer, and maybe a gap year to work for the absolute best pros you can find. Learn all the aspects of managing the business, not just the riding and the teaching.
Once you’ve spent some real time in the industry and made some useful contacts for the future, see if you can work out a situation where you work part time (or working student part time) for someone well known and well respected in the industry, while you pursue a general business degree from a nearby college.
A general business degree is much more useful than something equine - and contacts with real pros will go light years farther than an equestrian college to get you established in the industry.
I thought about going there, but thought that the additional business cost of employees, over and above the cost of raw salary, was not likely to change the outcome of the OP’s calculations respective to income and cost of operations. So, figured I’d leave that one for Accounting 101 
Like everything else in horses… take your projected costs and add 20% and that might get you to your EOY actuals!
Back in the early '90s, there was a Practical Horseman cover article on Don Stewart (back when PH was relevant), and the headline or lede, I forget which, was that he was making 100K a year. In the 90s, breaking six figures was a big, fat, furry deal, because most of the local horse pros I knew were really happy if they made 30 - 50K.
But the rest of the story was illustrative of what if took to make that number: he was on the road 40 weeks a year. (Now, with Wellington and WEF, it would probably be more) He rode 10 - 14 horses a day, every day. And his wife was his unpaid business manager, handling his clients, all the phone calls and booking all his rides. Her only income was that she had a custom needlepoint business (this was when you HAD to have a needlepoint backing on your custom chaps) which was pretty much a cash only business. I don’t remember if medical insurance was mentioned.
So when this was discussed at a party of all local horse pros, we all pretty much decided that while we admired Don, we didn’t want to be Don or have his business.
I teach school. After school and on breaks I give riding lessons. Plus I usually board a couple of horses. Basically it supports my habit. No, I don’t do breed level shows but I have fun at the local shows and my students do also.
It does mean 15 hour days more often than not but it is worth it to me.
Dreamy Sigh
I never had that, but so wanted it.
(Yes, totally off topic.)
I did my own in high school. It was so much work 
I would absolutely NOT turn your back on that college fund. Student loans can be crippling and the intel folks are giving you about equine degrees is correct. I’d also point out that the amateurs on this thread, who are your potential future clients, are not impressed by that degree either. Connections, results, and who you have worked for are your “resume” in the horse world.
Here’s what I would do if I was 17 and wanting to go pro: be a working student for the best pro you can find in your area until you graduate high school. Maybe take a gap year and go work a winter circuit. Then, get a business degree at a reputable school in an area with a big concentration of horses during the school year - Kentucky, Florida, etc. Work for the best pro you can find in THAT area on weekends, after class, during breaks, during summers, etc.
When you graduate with your useful and gloriously paid for degree, work all the connections you have and go get a job with horses in Europe. The young (ie, 30-something) pros I meet who have spent a few years in Europe are so much more sophisticated in their riding and horsemanship than those who have stayed in the “bubble” of the States, and if you want to do sales, having great European connections is key. I think it really gives you a leg up if you do it right.
By now you will be … 24? 26? 28? You will have a clearer idea of who you are and if horses are right for you. If they are, you have a pretty solid resume to go back to the States with. If not, voila: you have a non-horsey degree in your pocket and you can get an MBA to increase your earning potential.
You will change a lot in the next 5 to 10 years, trust me. And horse careers are insanely hard even if you come from money or a horsey family, which many successful pros do. I’m a normal ammy and I don’t envy the pros I know at all. Most of the ones with truly nice lives are independently wealthy and would have nice lives no matter what career they chose. Put yourself on a path that will give you options and flexibility down the line.
Lots of good suggestions here. I’ll add that I know a few people with horsey diplomas, but none of them work in the business anymore. Some never even got their foot in the door.
I worked for my trainer during the summers when I was in high school. I enjoyed it, but at the same time I always looked forward to the change of pace at the end of the summer, going back to school, not sweating my butt off or getting eaten by bugs. Not getting run over by young horses. Not having to deal with naughty horses in training. It was always peaceful knowing that I wouldn’t be too tired to ride my own horse at the end of the day.
I went and got a B.Sc then took a year off to work as a groom and BM. I had a blast, travelling for shows, spent the winter in Florida, met all sorts of big names. But it hit home again that it wasn’t something that I wanted to do long term.
I went back to school and did a post-grad in cardiac sonography. I get to work M-F, ride after work, show on the weekends. I don’t have to work outside during heat waves or snow storms. I don’t have to take my work home with me. I still clip and braid a little for extra cash and to keep in touch with various contacts. But I never feel like I have to do it. If I’d rather go camping with my boyfriend, or go to my niece’s birthday party I can.
What is about horses that makes you want to work with them? Do you want to ride? Do you want to teach? Do you like the idea of managing and organizing horses and people?
I would recommend either getting a business degree or some other degree that can get you a good enough job that you can also have the time and money to have a horse project on the go. Or find a career that allows you to branch into horses. I have a friend that’s a human chiropractor and she works on horses one day/wk. She doesn’t ride anymore after sustaining a serious and scary concussion, but she can still enjoy the horses.
Yes, going to Europe is a great idea. I’d add in taking some German classes in college for that. It’s hard to become totally fluent speaking in another language if you are in your home country. But once you get to Germany you will pick it up fast. And you should be able to learn to read German well in college courses. That will give you the ability to read sales ads, show results, and German blogs and FB posts, and put you way ahead of most Americans in navigating warm blood imports. You could find a niche as an agent for imports for American buyers.
I say German because that’s the source of a large chunk of the best performance warm blood horses right now, and they clearly have a very coherent system for training riders and coaches. You would need yourself to already be embedded in a fairly high level of competition to do this, so you would be on the level of your clients. It’s a whole other world from picking up American OTTB to do the two foot six.
If course if you already know French or Dutch you could choose one of those countries to apprentice in. If you speak Spanish or Portuguese you could get into the Iberian world.
If you are in a college that offers such things, you could even swing a study semester overseas in a country connected to your language courses. Probably too much to expect that would get you into a top name breeders, but I bet you could take riding lessons (they are cheap compared to North America) as part of connecting to the community, and learn a lot of horse terms in German.
I dont know where you are located or what level you are at. But I’d also suggest if you haven’t already, researching all the top shows and trainees in your discipline, even making a list or spreadsheet. So that you know who all the players are and the routes people take to the top.
When you are just starting out in a field, often the local or what you’ve been exposed to is very clear and sometimes over important, while everything above that or further away is a bit fuzzy and it’s hard to see how anyone gets there.
As an example, it’s really easy to get caught up in barn drama (even as an adult) about Susie and Janey in the two foot six schooling show, or Bossy Backyard Trainer trying to muscle her way up to Fourth Level, etc. That can take up all your brain space. Then you see Olympic or Longines riders on TV and they seem to come from a different world. It’s good to try to build a more coherent picture of the whole discipline even if you don’t participate in it.
For me, there was an eye opening moment. I’d returned to riding in good lessons on good enough horses at a mostly junior h/j barn that went to local rated shows under 3 foot (I never advanced to showing). I Googled the shows and figured out where this barn stood: competitive with the other similar barns, in big classes. That was good enough for me at the time.
Years later a young trainer friend invited me to watch a schooling day impromptu clinic on a private cross country field, riders who were prepping for Spruce Meadows. I’ve watched 4 foot jumpers from the stands, but never been right at the rail in a casual situation before (or indeed, since). I realized there was a core of people locally that trained at this level, and competed at that level at here and out of town. And were completely invisible from the vantage point of my cross rails h/j lessons. Different riders, different shows, different quality horses (stunning horses).
If you want to be a pro, you should try to aim high, not be stuck teaching beginner up down and flipping the odd OTTB for low dollar amounts. Find the people who are holding their own at the higher levels and apprentice there. The learning curve will be very very steep. Go in humble.
My neighbor has an Equine degree and runs a small Hunter/JUmper barn. It has 16 horses, two are hers. She is in her mid 20s, and has three employees. I think two of them work in trade for boarding, so I’m not sure if they are properly employees or not.
She works ALL THE TIME. Like, on Monday, when the horses have a rest, she’s doing all her administrative stuff. She rides at least 3 horses a day, teaches 3-4 lessons a day and does chores.
We were chatting the other day, I was ruminating on getting a horse, and she told me that if she didn’t work in horses, she wouldn’t have a horse. This is from someone who (according to her mother) was horse mad up until about a year after she opened her own barn.
And my neighbor has lots of support from her family so I’m sure she has only the usual expenses, and doesn’t have any college loans.
I said all this to say, yes, get yourself a business degree, because horses are a business, or you’ll make enough to have the luxury of a horse without it being nothing but business.
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