About a decade ago one of my sisters paid $90 for one of those trashy TV "get rich quick" schemes. In this case, it was the Carlton Sheets "no money down" real estate program (or some very similar program).
She's cleared more than a million a year for each of the last several years now, and she only works part time.
She did, however, also get her real-estate license, something that you **can** do with a $3,000 training budget.
I have a brother-in-law who owns several MailBoxes Etc. stores. I don't really know what he had to pay for his initial training to run the first one, so it may not apply to your $3k limit here, however, ever since UPS bought in, his business has doubled and he is now opening up several new stores.
Look, making money is easy (risky, but easy). That's not to say that everyone is going to flip houses and become a millionaire. For one thing, very few people want to risk their existing wealth on such gambles.
But jobs are out there. Our economy just grew by 2.4% in the last Quarter alone. Moreover, opportunities are out there.
Yeah, the high-flying days of the 1990's IT world may be gone. Woe is us in IT, but that doesn't mean that everyone else sees the world from such a depressing perspective.
Go get your real-estate license with your $3k from Bush. Go get a professional driver's license or a commercial pilot's license (though $3k would be mighty hard-pressed to get the commercial level, and certainly wouldn't get an Airline Transport Pilot license).
Go get scuba certified and teach diving. Do whatever works for you, but keep in mind that sometimes **you** have to personally change to keep up with the world.
Change is hard. We all fight it. We all want things to be the way they used to be.
Such is life.