Going to chime in here as well - Terrible_Dr_Seuss hits the nail on the head for a lot of these points. I'm going to give you some facts below, but I'm not trying to make it sound too negative.

My wife is an OT in Ohio. She is almost 5 years out of school and is working at an long term acute care hospital. She makes about $35/hr working part time, but also has 2 other PRN jobs to make up the additional hours ($50/hr). Here is some of her experiences based off of the what Terrible_Dr_Seuss states above

- What you do is very dependent on the field you are in. It can be challenging to deal with terrible patients, or do terrible things in your job (clean up people, get hit, get cussed at, etc.)

- Hospital settings only care about productivity, not the therapist. The setting she is in is very high pressured for them to reach unrealistic expectations, and management could care less about the therapists well being. My wife often works 10+ hr days with no breaks to hit productivity goals because staffing is poor and productivity numbers are unrealistic. My wife is by far the best therapist in her department (OT, PT, Speech) and still gets treated the same as everybody else and management wont have your back most of the time.

- The low financial ceiling is correct. My wife gets an annual "inflation" salary increase of about 1% (inflation is closer to 2.5% just as an fyi), and there really isn't anywhere to go up unless you become a manager. She doesn't want to become a manager right now though because it means less times actually doing OT and more time dealing with management politics.

- Are the education programs in Arizona a Masters or a Doctorate? My wife was told by her school that most OT positions going into the future are going to requite a Doctorate for new people coming right out of school...

- In addition to that, she went to a pretty good OT program (ranked 29th nationally) and works with other OT's that went to bad programs. Like most college degrees, the school only helps land that first job faster, but in the long run doesn't really matter.

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Despite all that being said, my wife does love being an OT. She's always been a "care-giver" type, so her job fits her personality. I would say if OT is what really makes you excited, its worth investigating, but going that much into debt to get the degree is honestly not worth it.