9 Highest Paying 2-Year Degree Jobs Ranked with Openings And Growth

What's uppers everybody?  Last Thursday I shared some well-received information on the top 25 paying jobs with the most openings and I fancied it with charts and ranks.  I'm bringing another useful enhancement of an article I caught today: 9 Highest Paying Jobs With A 2 Year Degree.  Articles like these are perfect to string people along, one click at a time, wasting everyone's time.  And they're always so wordy, aren't they?  I looked for two things when I clicked on each page, 1) The job title and 2) The salary amount, skipping all the other stuff.  It wasn't career day in my brain so I didn't much care about the job descriptions, though this may be useful to others, especially after reading this post here.

I took the liberty once again as I did last Thursday of gathering the most salient input from the 9 pages and creating something visual that's easy to comprehend: A chart!  I started by ranking the 9 jobs by median salary.  Here you go:

Rank	Job	Median Salary $
1	Air Traffic Controller	122,000
2	Radiation Therapist	77,000
3	Nuclear Technician	73,000
4	Dental Hygienist	72,000
5	Funeral Service Director	66,000
6	Registered Nurse	65,000
6	Magnetic Resonance Imaging Tech	65,000
7	Web Developer	62,500
8	Electronics Drafter	56,000

Air Traffic Controller tops the chart at a whopping $122K!  That is incredible pay…so much that it makes you ask, Why are employers willing to pay so much to Air Traffic Controllers?  Is it simple economics, i.e., not enough supply out there to keep airport control towers staffed, resulting in jacked-up pay to force create a market?  This Yahoo answer string starts to shed some light: Why do air traffic controllers make bank?

Taking a page out of Glassdoor.com's article, I wanted to find out how many openings there are for each job.  I used the job search site, Indeed, to look for current job openings (nationwide) as if I were seeking employment today.  I also refined my searches so that the exact title of the job came up each time.  When searches weren't clear enough, I clicked on the employer ad and made sure the offering was for the job type I was looking for, not some other one lumped in the category.  Here are the 9 jobs ranked by openings found today:

Rank	Job	Openings as of 5/26/15
9	Air Traffic Controller	23
8	Magnetic Resonance Imaging Tech	98
7	Radiation Therapist	134
6	Funeral Service Director	148
5	Electronics Drafter	440**
4	Nuclear Technician	940*
3	Web Developer	1,677
2	Dental Hygienist	2,799
1	Registered Nurse	10,725

* = The job did not come up in search as titled at Indeed.com or other top job search sites.  This is a best guess from a query at http://getintoenergy.jobs/jobs/?q=Nuclear+Technician.  **Search was inconclusive at Indeed.com, used Jobs.monster.com.

The highest paying job, Air Traffic Controller, has the fewest job openings nationwide.  There were so few of them, I clicked on the listings and found that most of them were being offered out of Houston, TX.  This wouldn't bode well for someone acquiring an associates degree in air traffic controlling who didn't live in Texas, and wanted no part of the Lone Star state.  "All my Ex's live in Texas!"  Speaking of Houston…let's pray that raining stops and people are okay.

I wanted to depict one last data point: Growth outlook for these careers.  Not everyone is going to be done with a two-year degree in these fields come this month.  Some people may just be starting out.  For this data, I went back to the BLS site.  According to the BLS, the average growth rate for ALL occupations is +11%.  In "Job Outlook, 2012-22," the BLS projects the percent change in employment for ten years.  Here are the results:

Rank	Job	Job Outlook, 2012-22
9	Air Traffic Controller	1%
8	Electronics Drafter	2%*
7	Funeral Service Director	12%
6	Nuclear Technician	15%
5	Registered Nurse	19%
4	Web Developer	20%
3	Magnetic Resonance Imaging Tech	21%
2	Radiation Therapist	24%
1	Dental Hygienist	33%

*Was N/A at the BLS site.  Used: http://www.campusexplorer.com/Electronics Drafter.

The job outlook for air traffic controller for the next seven years looks dismal.  Meanwhile, if you want to be in a career that will boom, Dental Hygiene is the path to take.  Now let's consolidate.  I will show you one last chart where I average the ranks of each career to give you the pound-for-pound best highest paying two year degree job.  Here you go:

Rank	Job	Pay	Openings	Outlook	Total	Avg
1	Dental Hygienist	4	2	1	7	0.26
2	Radiation Therapist	2	7	2	11	0.41
3	Registered Nurse	6	1	5	12	0.44
4	Nuclear Technician	3	4	6	13	0.48
5	Web Developer	7	3	4	14	0.52
6	Funeral Service Director	5	6	6	17	0.63
7	Magnetic Resonance Imaging Tech	6	8	3	17	0.63
8	Air Traffic Controller	1	9	9	19	0.7
9	Electronics Drafter	8	5	8	21	0.78

The clear winner, and decisively at that, is Dental Hygienist.  If you don't mind the single most disgusting thing in the world, the human mouth, then being a DH is for you!  You'll be cleaning teeth all day, but at least you won't be debt ridden from having undertaken a full Bachelor's degree course.  You'll make excellent pay, and you will find jobs easily for the next decade almost.  Teeth aren't going anywhere.

And with that…I'm off.  I hope you have enjoyed dissecting the best two-year careers currently available just as much as I have.  To continuously get great informative financial literacy posts, please subscribe to my blog (top left sidebar).  Thanks for reading! Peace out!  Carlos.