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:

4. Ship captain

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/File
Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, stands alongside Captain Tony Draper during a naming ceremony for the Royal Princess cruise ship in Southampton, England, in June. Cruise ship captains earn some $150,000 a year on average.

If life on the sea intrigues you, there are some very lucrative positions available for ship and boat captains, no college degree required. The Bureau of Labor statistics says that the median pay for captains, mates and pilots of water vessels is $66,150 with the top end positions making $125,930. However, other sources put the median at $100,000 and the top end closer to $500,000. Cruise ship captains, for example, earn $153,379; while Bar Pilots (who navigate the big ships into the dock) in San Francisco make $451,336. Job growth is projected at 37 percent over the next seven years. There are no 40-hour weeks at sea and isolation can be a problem, as can unpredictable weather conditions, but if that doesn’t bother you, neither will the taxes on all that money you’ll make.

4 of 5

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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.