Six-Figure Jobs, No College Necessary
Not all six-figure jobs require college degrees.
Jan. 26, 2009 — -- Maybe you don't want to spend all that time taking classes in obscure subjects while hoping to find your calling and piling up student loan debt. Maybe you don't really care so much about college. You just want to work and make money.
You can do it, but there aren't many fields where it happens very often. In our list of 14 potentially six-figure jobs that don't require a four-year diploma, only two have a median wage of above $100,000. For the rest, you'll have to be in the top 10% of earners, and even then you may find yourself working 50 to 60 hours a week.
Dr. Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at Payscale.com, says that most of these jobs share a few qualities. (Payscale's research provided the numbers that made this list possible. The company measured the average earnings for people with eight or more years in their field.)
No test can tell an employer how good you might be at some of these lines of work--real estate broker or fashion designer, for example. That's why a degree is less important to a potential employer than field experience and demonstrated past success. Either you're good at it or you're not.
Many of these jobs rely on variable pay (commission and overtime) to break six figures. Good plumbers, ultrasound techs and construction managers generally do a lot of overtime. It's far more valuable to a company to pay them extra than to hire an additional employee, Lee says. And that means workers can break past what they would earn if confined to 40 hours a week.
Stress is pretty much a given in all these occupations. A high price for failure is not uncommon. Cost estimators can't estimate too high on a project or they'll risk losing it to a competitive bidder. They can't go too low or their company won't make money on the deal. Radiation therapists and ultrasound technologists have to worry about the danger of malpractice suits. Court reporters mustn't miss a word in the courtroom. Air traffic controllers know that hundreds of lives ride on their actions.
