Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Only at first. People who graduate from vocational and technical programs may make more money IN THE BEGINING of their careers than say, your average History major. The opportunities for the History major are endless. The tech graduate will only experience incremental increases in wages, unless they receive more education.
Really? I have no degree, and can guarantee you I earn more than all but a tiny handful of history majors.
What are these "endless opportunities" for history majors? Other than getting on tenure track in academia. And, of course, other than the generic checkbox for having any degree at all.
Quote:
People with masters degrees earn more than those with bachelor degrees and over a life time, those with PhDs and professional degrees earn still more.
Tell that to my wife. She has an MBA, I think three Bachelor's, and an AA. I earn three times what she does.
And while I have certainly known several Ph.Ds who have done very well, that's pretty much exclusively in hard sciences (again, outside of academia). Where does a Ph.D in history make more than MBAs or people with real technical skills?
Higher education is, or can be, a good thing. But it is not a panacea, and there are literally millions of people out there with degrees that are unlikely to ever pay for themselves while those folks carry around five- and six-figures in debt it'll take them decades to repay.
Yep, get a degree in medieval history, have a couple of kids, work part-time, then complain that you need food stamps. Seriously? All this tells me is that you don't have to be very smart to complete a PhD program in medieval history.
It is not just liberal arts. STEM adjuncts are poor too!
Those people may have more options in the private sector. I grew up with a guy who got a PhD in chemistry from Indiana University several years back. He's bounced all around the country in search of work. He's in the private sector and earns low six figures, but he could have probably done that with a master's and not needed a PhD.
OK, first issue is forced diversity in hiring. The common requirement of 3.0 GPA disqualifies half of all black applicants and a third of Hispanics. Then comes the Praxis I basic skills test, which blacks are 40% more likely to fail than whites, and Hispanics are 20% more likely, and that same pattern holds for the Praxis II specialty/mastery exam.
But your current teaching force is ~75-80% white and you gotta be diverse, right? So no more white hires please, and now go find the qualified black/Hispanic, preferably female, applicant. Given the higher rates of disqualification on the standards of GPA and skills testing, yes, that is harder to find.
Second issue is the decline in quality of education colleges within the university system, where year after year, the lowest high school GPAs and SAT/ACT scores wind up. SJW indoctrination and a properly aware/awoke/inclusive/blah blah curriculum kills education majors on their Praxis exams same as fubar new age crap kills high schoolers on their SAT/ACT exams. Sounds great around the SJW protest water cooler, but when knowledge gets tested, uh oh...fail.
Third is the bureaucratic madness of the modern school system where both curriculum and discipline is concerned. Inmates run the asylum in too many schools and districts, so the best and brightest that do have the 4.0 GPAs and rocking praxis scores blow off the crappy public school and go to the nicer schools. Check out applications to the inner city school versus some shiny suburban castle of uppity soccer moms. You'll notice a difference in both quality and quantity of applicants. When I got my math undergrad, a bunch of people in my classes were getting math teaching degrees, and when they were close to graduating, they had to put their top three preferred school systems for job searching. All of them chose private/parochial and then the outer suburbs, and not one put the city's public system on their application. Not one person not one choice. When they got their initial destinations, it was done by GPA and Praxis scores. Bets scores got best schools, and so forth down the line.
Now, this is not just teaching. Lots of industries are having increasingly harder times finding properly qualified applicants for all kinds of jobs. Our education system is in decline, and even more than that, our national work ethic and ambition to succeed is in worse decline. Most jobs aren't that hard, they are just time consuming and boring. That's why it's called work and we get paid for doing it. But a lot of folks can't handle that and feel entitled to more fun, more money and less work. It starts in school.
Great post. Now add to this, that take me for example, a retirement-age nuclear engineer with a Physics degree. I am not considered "qualified" to teach say high school physics, because I don't have a teaching degree. Ahem. I "blew the doors off" my 8th grade science teacher ("You want to try to teach this class?" - she should have challenged Bruce Lee to a bout, she would have looked less ridiculous.) As a sophomore, I tutored a nursing major from a marginal D/F in "sandbox" physics to a solid "B". My department head called me in to his office to show me a graph he drew of her grades, and said quite seriously that if I had started working with her sooner (I started as soon as she asked) she would have likely made it up to an "A". So, while I *could* do the job, I am administratively locked out of it, and would have to spend time and money to "correct" that. Yet I can get on teaching as an adjunct professor at various local colleges and universities, teaching more interesting material to better motivated students. Guess which one has any chance of happening in real life?
Besides, as you note, low-IQ people abound amongst education majors. Why would I set myself up to have, effectively, an idiot for a boss?
Don't get me started about inner-city schools. When the kids are just there to cut up and eat a free lunch, what does anyone with half a brain think a teacher can do with them, besides just provide day care?
Well, learned helplessness affects all of us on some kind of level.
Back when I was a young engineer, whenever I came upon a problem I just went to ask my boss. Eventually, I realized that with the littlest effort on my part I could have resolve those problems on my own. But I felt helpless and needed help at the time. I bring this up because I now manage a team of engineers. I can definitely tell who is on track to become managers themselves and who will remain a lower level engineer forever because they cannot get over the feeling that they need help every time they come upon a problem. I try to encourage them to figure out possible solutions on their own, but some of them just automatically assume they are not capable to solve those problems themselves.
Learned helplessness can be found in every corner of society.
Slightly off topic, but, you could encourage the engineers with less confidence to "Go take a crack at this yourself, consider (this reference). When you think you have an answer, I will be glad to go over it with you. If you think this is going to take more than 2 hours of your time, you are going about it wrong. " A bit of tutoring, a bit of demonstrating confidence in them, and, bada bing, you can soon have fewer "wallflowers" in your group, instead all are willing to "step up to the plate" so to speak.
I see you are trying to do this already, I guess my suggestion is just to be more - what - adamant about saying that they really should be able to solve the problem on their own. You might also point out that junior staff's solutions are seldom put into practice without some sort of senior review, so if they are worried about their ideas or calculations resulting in a bridge that falls down, that is quite unlikely. You don't seem to me to be the bullying sort, I think your staff will respond well to you encouraging them to take initiative.
This can be one of the hardest parts of being a manager and leader, but, in the long run, it pays off the most as well.
Those people may have more options in the private sector. I grew up with a guy who got a PhD in chemistry from Indiana University several years back. He's bounced all around the country in search of work. He's in the private sector and earns low six figures, but he could have probably done that with a master's and not needed a PhD.
This guy may very well have work-related issues that are not related to his chemistry "chops". I won't try to list these, but, as an example, stuff like poor technical writing skills can hold a guy back. If you know the right answer, but you can't write it down such that the boss can understand and approve it, and the guys in the shop can implement it, in a way, you are not much better than the guy who can't solve the technical issue at all. (In the above, "guy" embraces "gal", which, as Churchill pointed out, is the way it should be anyway.)
And to think that football and basketball coaches
are among the highest paid state employees in
most states. A basketball coach in Maryland is
the highest paid state employee there.
And to think that football and basketball coaches
are among the highest paid state employees in
most states. A basketball coach in Maryland is
the highest paid state employee there.
I'm guessing the basketball coach generates a lot more money for a lot more people than your average liberal arts professor.
Great post. Now add to this, that take me for example, a retirement-age nuclear engineer with a Physics degree. I am not considered "qualified" to teach say high school physics,because I don't have a teaching degree. Ahem. I "blew the doors off" my 8th grade science teacher ("You want to try to teach this class?" - she should have challenged Bruce Lee to a bout, she would have looked less ridiculous.) As a sophomore, I tutored a nursing major from a marginal D/F in "sandbox" physics to a solid "B". My department head called me in to his office to show me a graph he drew of her grades, and said quite seriously that if I had started working with her sooner (I started as soon as she asked) she would have likely made it up to an "A". So, while I *could* do the job, I am administratively locked out of it, and would have to spend time and money to "correct" that. Yet I can get on teaching as an adjunct professor at various local colleges and universities, teaching more interesting material to better motivated students. Guess which one has any chance of happening in real life?
Besides, as you note, low-IQ people abound amongst education majors. Why would I set myself up to have, effectively, an idiot for a boss?
Don't get me started about inner-city schools. When the kids are just there to cut up and eat a free lunch, what does anyone with half a brain think a teacher can do with them, besides just provide day care?
That's been exactly my experience as well. The barriers to entry keep well qualified professionals out.
That's been exactly my experience as well. The barriers to entry keep well qualified professionals out.
Same.
Although, if every smart professional who wanted to teach a class to make an extra few thousand dollars were eligible to do so, the wages would fall even more.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
