Five high-paying jobs for high school graduates

Americans have a near-religious belief that you have to go to college to be successful, but the post-recession, still-evolving U.S. economy is testing that conviction. Here are five jobs that offer high school graduates a chance to earn more than that, according to Debt.org, sometimes much more:

3. Construction manager

Ted S. Warren/AP/File
Juan Garnero, a construction manager with Seattle Tunnel Partners, gives a tour in July of the control room of 'Bertha,' the massive tunnel boring machine that is expected to spend the next 14 months drilling a two-mile tunnel to replace the 60-year-old Alaskan Way Viaduct.

If you’re ambitious, and just starting in the construction industry, being a project manager could be an achievable goal. The construction manager is responsible for overseeing projects, scheduling work hours, hiring contractors, and budgeting for the project. The median salary is $83,860 with the top managers making $150,000. Some large companies feel the position requires a bachelor’s degree, but long-time experience in all areas of either residential or commercial construction is still considered the best ticket to getting the job. And you only need a high school education to get started.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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