I found a high-paying health-care job without going to medical school

Lauren Perraut, 32, earns $122,000 a year as a pathologists' assistant in Lexington, Kentucky, where she lives with her husband and their 2-year-old son. She chose a two-year graduate program at Duke University over medical school so she could get hands-on with organs and biopsies rather than sit behind a microscope. Today, she works at Pathology & Cytology Labs, dissecting samples for a local hospital.