Families are preparing to hear from colleges for their teenage darlings. Each acceptance will come with a price tag of up to $400,000 plus the cost of the darling not being in the workforce for four years (foregone wages). In order to cheer everyone up who is facing these costs, let me relate a conversation that I had with a farrier recently. We shared a row on a commercial flight to PBI, the second-closest airport to the equestrian gold mine of Wellington, Florida (there’s also a fabulous airpark right in Wellington!).
A farrier may prepare for the career with a half-year program (example; also, a 16-week $8500 program at Cornell) and then start as an apprentice. If joining a multi-farrier enterprise, the starting salary can be over $60,000 per year. After 10 years, a farrier who works hard among show horses should be earning about $250,000 per year. That’s with 6 months of post-high-school education and is about 2X what a veterinarian earns (BLS).
Note that this career does require maintaining some physical fitness: “Be able to lift 75 pounds and be in reasonable physical condition for the work,” says Cornell.
At the beginning of his career, my grandfather was a blacksmith which included shoeing horses. He ended up building car/truck trailers in the ’40s. He used to build us sculptures by welding horse shoes with wrought iron. He was a tough bastard, like scary tough. (Does Cornell give lessons in that?) I guess like most occupations, the lure of an Ivy League school is primarily the connections — like to the several people rich enough to need horse shoers, er farriery-ists. The Cornell program only accepts four at a time:
> Due to limited facilities, only up to 4 applicants may be accepted for each 16-week program
Working on horses isn’t like working on the 5 liter ‘stang (even that is too scary for many moderns — how many times has my life depended on cheap Chinese jack stands, whose welds my GF would scoff at?). My wife worked with a guy whose side project was raising horses. He was kicked in the head, despite being very familiar with horses from an early age.
It is quite forward thinking of Cornell, the. They should expand the program to plumbing, so Phil can get his bath tub fixture replaced at some point in the future.