What's a good career to study for in college that will get a degree in a short amount of time & decent pay?
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The salary you want is not accessible unless you earn a professional degree (M.D., J.D., C.P.A., Ph.D.) and that takes years of graduate school, after your bachelors degree.
Shortest route: nursing degree. There is a shortage of nurses in America now, and some hospitals give cash incentives for you to sign on with them.
Then keep studying, and earn more degrees. The M.S. in Nursing is a very hot degree at present.
Best wishes.
Hard to say - that's pretty much the pay range for someone with a professional degree (PhD, MD, JD, etc). And that takes a lot of time to complete. Have you considered starting a business or opening a franchise?
Get a clue that that's not going to happen. People study several years to get pay like that. Most bachelor degree jobs will get you $40,000-$50,000 per year, if you are lucky and depending on your major. Engineering isn't a bad choice, but that could take a while. Business isn't bad either, but you still need to have the right connections to get a great paying job. Lowering your standard pay to $30,000 to $40,000 would produce a lot more options, like teaching.
If jobs like the one you want were easy to get, everyone would do it. Starting pay for most masters degrees is $55,000-$75,000. Honestly, you may as well use your college tuition money for lotto tickets. Sorry to be blunt, but its the truth.
It's impossible to make that kind of money having just earned a bachelor's degree unless you have some superior technical skills and experience relevant to a degree, but in such an instance you probably would not need a bachelor's degree. Your best shot is probably to major in accounting, which is in very high demand and doesn't usually include work on the weekends, but I would expect no more than $50,000 to start, under the best of circumstances. That's still a great salary.
As for a short amount of time, check out bain4weeks.com for advice on how to do that, although keep in mind you may not get the best-paying job by getting any old degree.
As for starting a business, you will almost certainly not make those kinds of profits right away, especially without a good business plan and a lot of startup capital, so I would discount that option unless you have at least a five-year time horizon in which to make a profit. Most new businesses are unprofitable and fail anyway. Forget about franchises if you do not have at least $500,000-$1 million capital available to you.
Learn a profession in demand, like nursing. If you want high pay, just be the best student in the field. Study extra, get all perfect grades, use the library, etc. Then get recommendations from your professors to attach to your résumé. If you are the top student, you have first dibs on the top starting jobs.
I would go to the local technical college and get a LPN nursing degree in 15 months.
Then I would work weekend specials--which means all weekend (32 hrs) and get paid for 40 hours.
You would have the entire week at that point to major in whatever you wanted. Obviously you would never be home--at the library because you would not have your weekends--but you would be able to make ends meet.
What about physician's assistant? You go from the LPN to the BSN (takes a year or 2) whle working fulltime on weekends. then more education to get the physicians asst, but again, you have your full-time nursing job.
The advice above from BurningPyre is right on target! It's this mentality that all of the late night "get rich quick" programs (not to mention, also all over the internet) prey upon. Of course, there are millions of people looking for the same thing... little effort, little cost to get into, little education, little time invested = big income. Of course, there are the "few" that might get lucky and hit it big, but they are certainly the 'VERY FEW". Most have to work long hours, for a long time to get where they're going in life.
A bachelor's degree isn't measured in the number of years to complete. It's measured in the number of college hours required for a particular degree. So, the number of years it takes you to get it, depends on how many courses you can take and keep up with at one time. However, many colleges may limited the maximum number of credit hours they will allow you to take and you may have to get special permission to exceed a "normal course load."
As far as, making $85-150K/yr... unless you have a rich relative that will hire you in at that level, I'd say you're dreaming. It's still going to take a few years of hard work and dedicated effort to climb the corporate ladder to get to those positions that pay that much.
If you ever hope to get that degree, start NOW. I went back and started taking courses when I was 43. Talk to the college counselors. If money is a problem, there are government programs that may be available to you. There are even some that offer daycare services at the college, if you can't afford to hire a sitter. Going back to college isn't just going to sign up... start by doing a little "homework" and see what may be available to you.
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