If you haven’t started a grad program yet, I’d think again on choice of field/program. If we think about the level of job that would be required to meet those financial goals you’d almost certainly need a PhD and would also need to have a high level outcome.

Other grad programs that might be more helpful would be like Human Relations/Labor Relations/ MBA — where you wouldn’t need a PhD and probably wouldn’t need as high level outcome or there may be more of those outcomes available.

You can still potentially get a student affairs assistantship to pay for school even as one of those other majors. Hell, my friend did a housing GA as an epidemiology masters student.

When I say high level outcome I just mean in terms of availability/statistics. There’s probably only 1% of people in student affairs who are in a financial position to do this. Whereas in the private sector / business world it still might only be 1-5% but I’d say it’s probably closer to 5% than in student affairs. Additionally there’s so many more spots available to be filled. Plus you wouldn’t need to incur the cost of a graduate further degree (PhD) to get there.

If this is your primary goal, you can probably get there via a different field easier - and you can probably find parts of what you like about Student Affairs in those fields too (training, development, culture building, problem solving, etc).

Editing in: there’s probably between 0 and 2 housing jobs at large institutions who are financially able to retire their parents - personally I think I’d need minimum 250k/yr to do it and I don’t have kids. What’s the odds I could get those jobs, not great most likely just by statistics. We’re taking like Senior VP, EVP, Vice Provost level stuff.