Respiratory Therapist

What the work actually is

O*NET, on respiratory therapists: set up and operate devices such as mechanical ventilators, therapeutic gas administration apparatus, environmental control systems, and aerosol generators; monitor patient's physiological responses to therapy, such as vital signs, arterial blood gases, and blood chemistry changes, and consult with physician if adverse reactions occur; read prescription, measure arterial blood gases, and review patient information to assess patient condition; provide emergency care, including artificial respiration, external cardiac massage, or assistance with cardiopulmonary resuscitation; maintain charts that contain patients' pertinent identification and therapy information; inspect and test respiratory therapy equipment to ensure equipment is functioning safely and efficiently.

⚠ This is a critical-care job from the first week, not after a few years. A nurse is assigned to a unit; a respiratory therapist covers the hospital — intensive care, the emergency department, the neonatal unit, the wards — and is called to whatever is deteriorating. If you want to know whether the work suits you, that is the question to answer, not whether you can pass the science.

Projected need — and both federal sources agree

✅ Unusually, O*NET and the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook say the same thing here, which is worth stating because on several other paths on this site they do not.

• O*NET (2024–34 projections): 139,600 employed, growth much faster than average (7% or higher), 8,800 openings a year, median wages $82,280 (2025).
• BLS OOH (2025–35 projections): 142,000 jobs, growth 9%, much faster than average, employment change +12,100, 2025 median pay $82,280, typical entry-level education associate's degree.

⚠⚠ $82,280 on a two-year degree is the second highest of any two-year route on this site — behind dental hygiene's $98,100, just above radiography's $80,110, and roughly $18,000 above an LPN. 99% of O*NET respondents name an associate degree as the education required, and 1% a bachelor's.

⚠⚠⚠ The course numbers are looser here than in any comparable clinical programme

Florida's respiratory care prefix carries 264 live course numbers across just 23 public institutions, for a curriculum about eighteen courses long. The consequence is blunt: no course number in the field is carried by more than 15 of the 23 institutions, and most are carried by three or four. Measured against the other two large two-year clinical programmes taught at the same colleges, it is the least consistently numbered of the three:

⚠⚠⚠ The four-course clinical sequence is the clearest case: the colleges that file it as RET 1874 / 1875 / 2876 / 2877 and the colleges that file it as RET 1874L / 1875L / 2876L / 2877L are almost perfectly disjoint sets — one college carries both forms of one of the four, and no college carries both forms of any other. It is the same course, filed two ways. An evaluator matching on the identifier sees a mismatch where there is none.

⚠ What to do about it, and it is simple: register out of your own programme's published sequence, and when you transfer or apply anywhere, send the syllabus and the clinical competency log rather than the course number. The number will not describe what you did; the competency record will.

⚠⚠ The state record will not tell you what to take first

Of the 148 active statewide records in this prefix, not one names a non-respiratory course as a prerequisite. Where a prerequisite is recorded at all it is prose rather than a course number — “intro to pharmacology, applied biology”, “knowledge and proficiency in basic respiratory”, “admission to the AS to BS in cardiopulmonary sciences”.

⚠ So the gate is admission to the programme, not a course, and the prerequisite list is set by each college. The courses listed on this page as preparation come from a real Florida curriculum — Indian River State College's 76-credit A.S. — where anatomy and physiology I and its lab must be finished by the end of the first fall, anatomy and physiology II and the mathematics by the end of the first spring, and everything in the major plus medical terminology needs a grade of C or higher. Check your own college's list; it will differ, and notably that one requires no chemistry and no microbiology where others do.

⚠ Selective admission, and the arithmetic of a marginal grade

Every one of these programmes is limited-access and cohort-based. Seminole State takes 30 students a year, opens applications for a single month, starts one cohort each August and runs a five-term lock-step sequence; Daytona State requires its introductory course, offered in only two terms of the year, before you can even apply.

⚠⚠ In a lock-step sequence a failed course does not cost you a term, it costs you a year — the course runs once, the clinical placement is arranged around it, and re-entry may require re-application. Where a lecture and its laboratory list each other as corequisites, failing either means repeating both. Budget the time before the term starts, not after the first bad grade.

⚠ Before the first rotation, not after

Clinical placement clearances take weeks and are not part of registration: Florida Level 2 fingerprint background screening, immunisations and TB screening, drug screening, health insurance and BLS certification, with ACLS for critical care and NRP and PALS before a neonatal or paediatric rotation. Provider courses fill up, and an uncertified student simply cannot enter the unit.

⚠⚠ Two different bachelor's degrees, and they are not interchangeable

Three Florida institutions award a bachelor's in this field alongside an associate degree, and two award only a bachelor's. They are not the same product.

• An entry-level bachelor's admits you with no credential and leads to the same NBRC examinations. Florida A&M's B.S. in Cardiopulmonary Science is one (CoARC #200321, accredited through October 2034); the University of West Florida opened another, which UWF describes as only the third of its kind in the state.
• A degree-advancement bachelor's is a completion degree for therapists who already hold the credential. It does not lead to initial licensure. The state's own course file gives the ladder away, gating one upper-division number on “admission to the AS to BS in cardiopulmonary sciences”.

⚠ The upper-division courses are specialisation, not more of the same. One college's bachelor's is built around cardiac ultrasound, another's around advanced life support and credentialing, another's around critical-care management and research. That is a genuine reason to choose one over another, and no CIP listing shows it.

⚠⚠⚠ One warning the data produced: the University of Central Florida carries 38 respiratory care course numbers in the state file, awards nothing under the federal code, lists no respiratory or cardiopulmonary degree, and does not appear in CoARC's Florida directory. Course numbers surviving in the state file are not evidence that a programme exists. Check the CoARC directory before you plan around a college.

Necessary skills

• Cardiopulmonary physiology, held in working memory. Gas exchange, ventilation–perfusion matching and acid–base balance are not background; they are what you reason with at the bedside while someone waits.
• Arterial blood gas interpretation. The single most-used skill, and the one that distinguishes a therapist from a technician.
• Equipment under pressure. Ventilators, circuits and alarms, diagnosed and fixed while the patient is on them.
• Calm and clear speech. You explain a mask to a frightened patient, and you tell a physician what you think is happening, briefly, in an emergency.
• Documentation. The competency log and the chart are what your licence, your accreditation and any future transfer all rest on.

Advice

⚠ Do three things before you apply. Check the programme against CoARC's directory at coarc.com — accreditation, not the college's reputation, is what makes you eligible to sit. Get the programme's own prerequisite list and application window in writing, because they vary between colleges and the window is often a single month. And ask a working therapist to let you shadow a shift, because the thing that decides whether this career suits you is not the science.

⚠⚠ Plan for the RRT from the start. The CRT is the minimum Florida will license, and it is increasingly not what employers hire. Ask your programme directly what proportion of its graduates hold the RRT within a year — CoARC publishes outcomes data and programmes know their own numbers.

⚠ And keep every competency evaluation and clinical hour log. A receiving programme or employer must attest to your clinical competence under its own accreditation; it cannot do that from a transcript line, and in a field with 59 different numbers for clinical practice, the transcript line will not even say what you did.