I think getting to 125k is not going to be easy for many people, but I believe it is achievable by those with average (to above average) intelligence with lots of hard work, sacrifices, and the right decisions.
Here's what I think are the decisions that need to be made:
(1) The choice of school program. For example, instead of physics enroll in engineering, instead of english take accounting, instead of biology do nursing.
(2) Move to the big city where salaries are higher. I would guess that in silicon valley, salaries might be double what they'd be compared to low cost of living areas like the midwest. Obviously varies by occupation.
(3) Choice of employer. Work for a consulting firm that rewards performance (aka 50-60+ work weeks) instead of a government job. If you have a math degree don't go into teaching but instead work for the man in a corporate job. Be willing to be a road warrior.
Regarding intelligence levels
IQ Ranges of Occupations - Careers - | LearnHub
which I believe is taken from
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
suggests that even for highly competitive occupations like MD the range of IQs (105-130) allows for people with average intelligence (median should be 100 with 15 pts for +/- one std dev.). (Note I am unsure of the quality of this paper as I didn't have time to do more than skim it and this is not my field).
With respect to police officers, the base pay in San Jose is 108K and with overtime many hit 125K. I think San Jose pays more than most, but I'm guessing you will get similar salaries at other high cost of living areas. The city publishes salaries at:
Employees Salaries Lookup
As an aside the police chief made $525K in 2010!!! The top police sargent was at 263K, top police officer at 224K. I suspect there's a lot of pension spiking going on, but if you select the Police dept and scroll down a few pages, you can see POs who get most of their pay from base + overtime.
I think we don't see more people at $125K because folks don't want to make these choices. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I would never recommend to a high school student to take engineering/accounting solely because of the pay.
Thanks for the research. I figured high cost areas would have higher salaries, but I hadn't looked for details. Your estimate of "double" looks about right. I entered "trooper" into this site
State Salaries 2010 | The Des Moines Register | DesMoinesRegister.com and got a median around $64k and a top end of $77k for state police in Iowa (I assume this is non-supervisory).
I can believe that someone in San Jose could look at national wage data and think that doesn't relate to his own experience. Both the cost of living and the cost of keeping up with the neighbors is unusually high in San Jose. "The cost of living in San Jose and the surrounding areas is among the highest in California and the nation. ... Despite the high cost of living in San Jose, households in city limits have the highest disposable income of any city in the U.S. with over 500,000 residents."
San Jose, California - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From a tax policy perspective, some people who post here think we should vary tax brackets by geographic area because of that. I tend to be more like FD and think location is a choice.
So I should re-phrase my statement to something like "Most people can't get into the top 10% of earnings
for their area simply by hard work". That may close half the disagreement we seem to have.
The Wisconsin paper looks interesting. Based
just on the intro and a couple tables he seems to be saying that while we're sure "that children’s opportunities are anything but equal", sociologists have concentrated their research on things like family and community support and haven't done much with IQ. I've been using "IQ" as if it represented all the uncontrollable factors, and that can be misleading.
So again, I should clean up my wording. Let "A" be all the things in life we can't control: genes, parents, schools, childhood health, corporate takeovers, your boss quitting at the ideal time, the macro economy, etc. Then let "B" be all the things we can control: how many hours we work, choosing engineering instead of math teaching, investing time in education instead of earning/spending now, etc. Let "E" be total financial results.
There is a range of possible values for A. If we track 1,000 people with the same value of A, we'll see a variation in E, which will reflect individual choices regarding B. For any value of A, it's possible to find people with E=0, since anyone can choose to make B=0. But, for any A, we'll observe a maximum value of E, and that value will go up as A goes up.
That's pretty abstract. I'll compare it to the IQ vs. occupation chart. IQ is just one part of A, and occupation is just one part of E. Suppose we could sharpen up that chart by having the rows represent various levels of E instead of just occupation, and the bars show ranges of A instead of IQ.
I'm thinking the bars, at least toward the bottom (the high E's) would be noticeably shorter than they are on the IQ/occupation chart, primarily because the left edge would move over to the right.
Even on the IQ/education chart, they didn't see anyone with an IQ below 105 becoming an MD. But lots of kids want to be doctors when they grow up, and I'm sure that plenty of them have IQs below 105 and really tried to get there (at least for a while). But none of them survived. So for 63% of the population, "MD" seems impossible. I go further and think the one person with the 105 had lots of other things going for him/her, and maybe ended up with an income well below the average MD. So if we corrected for that kind of fuzziness, replacing IQ with all of A, the 63% will go up. I end up thinking that for 80% or 90% of the possible values for A, we won't be able to find anyone who reached the income level of the typical MD.
Of course, I don't have the resources to prove that. Even with the good longitudinal pool, we'd have to do face-to-face interviews with everyone designed to pull out all the possible A and B factors. I can easily provide anecdotes of people I know who appear to have never had a chance, you'd say you've heard of people who seemed to beat the odds in a way that anybody could copy. I'll say, you don't know enough about them, if B alone is enough to get anyone up to a certain earnings level, is more B adequate to get to ten times that level? You'd say ..... etc...
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