Nurses - a salary question. [View All]

My friend and I are both approaching 50 and both have a bachelor's degree from back when. We are both due to start nursing school in the fall. She is going to a program at a university that if she goes full time she can have an MSN in two years. The tuition is about $800/hr. I am going to the community college and in two years will have an RN. I will pay about $3,000 per year for tuition. My friend has had some tight financial times and wants to make as much money as possible when she gets out. She is planning to take on student loans for all that tuition, which should be about $50,000 if she takes summers off but she may have to go then also so it could be a good bit more. I told her it will probably take her many years to pay those loans back (I had them the first time around and speak from experience) and that the pay scale is probably not going to be so much greater between the MSN and the RN to warrant that. I would think the MSN would mainly be for if you want to be in a supervisory position. I'm just too old to get into that kind of debt and won't be working all that many years before I retire. So those of you in the field, what do you think? Is all that tuition expense worth it?