The Hottest Jobs (No College Degree Required)

The Rich Get RicherMany Americans are troubled by the income gap between the nation's highest earners and everyone else -- a gap that has grown dramatically in recent decades. In the last five years, inflation-adjusted wages rose less than 1 percent a year for the vast majority of households. But for the top 5 percent of earners, they jumped 2.5 percent a year. And for the top 1 percent of earners, the gains were much bigger: In 2005, the average CEO made 369 times as much as the average worker, compared with 131 times as much in 1993.

"I'm sorry to say I feel the rich are getting richer, and the rest of us are fighting to survive," says DeAnna Forman, who made $25,000 as a bartender in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. "I feel like I'm always trying to catch up." Kirk Kuchera, who earned $8,300 as a behavioral counselor for youth in Austin, Minn., agrees. "It appears to me that the lower middle class continues to work its way down the economic ladder, while those at the top of the corporate ladder move higher and higher at an unbelievable pace," he says.

Experts are concerned about wage inequality too. "We're in an economy that provides outsized, almost lottery-style gains to certain people in certain professions," says John Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm. He worries that, with college so expensive, graduates are forced to seek higher-salaried jobs to pay off their debts, avoiding critical lower-paying fields like education and social services. Income inequality has a negative impact in well-paid fields too: The extremely lucrative business side of medicine has drawn so much interest, for example, that more than 40 medical schools now offer an M.B.A. degree as well as an M.D. for graduates who want to go into health-care management or to Wall Street, where a doctor can earn millions advising hedge funds on biotechnology investments. Meanwhile, there's a national shortage of doctors in family practice, whose median income is $161,000.

But not all good jobs require a four-year college degree, says John Challenger. "Some of the best opportunities are for workers with an associate degree or some kind of vocational training. One type of worker in particularly high demand is interpreter/translator."

Of course, the best job is work you enjoy. "I'm happy to be doing something I really like," says Gina Campbell, who made $32,300 as a puppeteer for an educational children's theater company in Washington, D.C., last year. "I'm thrilled that I'm making as much as I am. Prior to this job, I'd had one full-time job and two part-time jobs and never made more than $22,000 a year."


The Hottest Jobs (No College Degree Required) NY NURSE CAREER