Are Teachers Overpaid?

A while back I took a look at teacher pay from one perspective and concluded that they’re definitely not underpaid. Here’s another look at the same issue, summed up very cleanly and concisely.

One of the arguments against the kind of comparison that I did is that comparing teachers’ compensation to median compensation isn’t an apples to apples comparison. We should instead, the argument goes, be comparing them to those who hold similar educational credentials. The public school teacher defenders then go on to compare teachers against college educated workers and show that, by comparison, teachers don’t do as well.

Except that this comparison at least as flawed, and probably moreso, than comparing to the median worker. With a median worker comparison we get a sense of how teachers are valued compared to society as a whole. Teachers, on average, are valued significantly higher than a typical worker. The education level comparison, on the other hand, is poor because it’s also not an apples to apples comparison. Common degrees for teachers are:

• Education degrees or some variant (art education, math education, history education, etc.).The only real comparison you can do here is public school teachers vs. private school teachers, which the video above does. Note the huge premium that public school teachers get. Outside of teaching, this degree is worthless on the job market. One the one hand, you could argue that the government is picking up the tab for a public good. On the other hand, you could argue that we’re paying teachers to get worthless degrees. Both arguments have merit.
• Liberal arts degrees (English, History, Philosophy, etc). Compared to their private sector counterparts, teachers with these degrees are vastly overpaid. We’ve all heard the common refrain that liberal arts majors get: “What are you going to do with that degree? Teach?” Given the glut of liberal arts majors working craptastic jobs (I have one friend with a MA in English who tries to support his wife and stepdaughters on his pay as a host at Ruby Tuesday), we could probably pay these teachers a lot less and still fill the positions with qualified (at least on paper, which is all the government cares about) applicants.
• Math and Science degrees.By far the minority of degrees for school teachers, this is the one subgroup that can make an honest case for being underpaid. A decently bright (read: average or slightly above average intelligence) worker with a math degree can find plenty of work, and at decent pay. Surprise, surprise – this is the group that the public schools always have trouble filling. At least part of this is because of union encouraged government pay scales that pay all teachers the same.

Comparing teachers with these degrees against national averages of those with any degree is going to result comparing the apples of education and liberal arts degrees (with a spattering of math and science degrees) against the oranges of the degreed public at large including science, engineering, and technical degrees. The engineering degrees alone are going to bring the private sector average up substantially.

What about teachers with masters degrees? Here you’re looking at a group that’s almost exclusively Master’s in Education degrees – another degree you just won’t find outside of teaching – versus a group that includes Master of Science degrees, Master of Engineering degrees and oh yeah, professional degrees like MDs and JDs (two groups that out earn everybody except perhaps the engineers graduate degrees).

Again, all of this is before even considering if they’re actually doing a good job of teaching (which all of the available data and my own personal experiences show that they’re decidedly not).

Like Ferdinand, I’m not happy to see the further decline of middle class America. He raises some very good points about just how messed up our government policy is. But taking a stand here to protect the middle class is the economic equivalent of social conservatives fighting against gay marriage to preserve the sanctity of marriage itself. It’s over and lost already, and even if it weren’t this is the smallest of small potatoes in that war.

A Rant on Higher Education

“Higher education” is a topic that gets a lot of talk in the manosphere, and a lot of it in relation to how a college campus isn’t a great place to be a man these days. Fair enough, and I agree with a lot of that. Today I’m going to rant on something else though: how broken it is.

Through a completely bizarre set of circumstances that applies to almost nobody else in the US, I found myself in grad school at the beginning of 2010 (I entered mid-school year; like I said, bizarre circumstances). Initially, I was excited. I’m not really sure why. I hated my undergrad years. I guess I was hoping that being at a different (and bigger and better rated) university would be better. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

Despite my enthusiasm, just in the last year I’ve witnessed the following (keep in mind that this school is consistently scored in the top 50 US universities by US News & World Report):

• Professors who can’t work their own examples. I’m not talking about once or twice – I’ll forgive anybody a bad day. I mean any of them. This despite having taught the same class for 10 years.
• Professors who give lectures with details that are just plain wrong (demonstrably so). Again, not in isolated cases, but frequently.
• Professors who simply don’t give enough information for the students to do the assigned projects. This hasn’t hampered me; I’ve got a lot of experience in the field, and I’ve only had one project in my entire educational career that I’ve considered “non-trivial.” But I’ve watched it cause real problems for my fellow students, and even felt really bad that I haven’t had time to help them.
• Professors who don’t speak English well enough to write coherent test questions. I’m sorry, but that should be a basic minimum for the job.
• Professors passing off biased made-for-TV movies as if they’re historically accurate. Nevermind that this is a technical class and there’s really no good reason to be watching anything like this in the first place.

Yeah, my enthusiasm died pretty fast. If I dredge my memory of my undergrad days, the story gets even worse.

• Professors who more or less can’t speak English at all.
• Professors who can’t show up to class because they have job interviews.
• Professors who aren’t proficient enough in the programming language they’re supposed to be teaching to actually, you know, program – much less teach it.
• Professors who can’t even tell you what the title of the class means.

These are the gate keepers who hold all the power over the rest of us. They control what careers we can and can’t have, by virtue of their power to grant (or deny) us their stamp of authority and let us get the appropriate credentials. Supposedly they’re “educating” us.

I have had the occasional truly awesome professor, and with them, a few truly awesome classes. They are the exception, not the rule.

As I said above, I have a very bizarre set of circumstances for being back in school. Those circumstances include an offer for a pretty ridiculous (in a good way) salary after I finish my master’s degree. If I didn’t have that… dear god, I don’t think I could put up with this shit anymore. I’m not sure it’s possible to pay me enough to go back for a PhD once I’m done.