What a sad statement this is.

[MadHound]

"20 Worst-Paying College Degrees in 2010"
<http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/110196/20-worst-paying-college-degrees-in-2010?mod=edu-continuing_education>

Three of these top twenty professions have to do with education, a sad statement about how our society values and prioritizes what is truly of value to us. While Wall St. workers can start out at 2-3 the rate of pay of teachers, while lawyers and business types start out far ahead of teachers, those of us in education, who generally take the most college classes, and thus have the most college debt burden, get stuck at the very bottom.

Is it any wonder that bright, talented students who would love to go into teaching move on to something else besides teaching. They can't afford to teach. Back in the bad old days education benefited from the captive labor force of women, but women are no longer relegated to a couple of professions, thus they are shunning education for the low paying job it is.

If you look at Japan and Finland, the top two education systems in the world, what you find is that teachers are valued, respected, and paid, like doctors are in this country. This kind of reward attracts the best and brightest to the profession, and the benefits of having the best and brightest in the profession is obvious.

But we try to do education on the cheap in this country, always have. While we talk a good game about education being a high priority in our society, when the rubber meets the road, we slash, and slash some more out of education budgets across the country.

The fact of the matter is that while we continue to underpay teachers, continue to underfund education, our education system is going to among the worst in the developed world. Doesn't matter how many standardized tests you throw at the kids, or how much you privatize education, until we start truly fund education, it is going to remain an running sore.

Twenty six billion is barely a down payment on this. What is needed is a concerted effort to fully fund every school facility and to insure that teachers are amongst the top tier of high paying professions in this country. It is that simple. Otherwise, we will continue to do future generations a horrible disservice.

This solution has been known for a long while. But the fact of the matter is that nobody wants to state the obvious, state the truth. Instead, they want to continue to try and do education on the cheap, while spending trillions on wars.

Don't you think it is past time we rearranged our priorities?

[sui generis]

1. to be fair I am happy that theology and religious studies don't pay well

or maybe that's being unfair, but I'll own it. We have enough witch doctors running around giving us bumper sticker life advice that an entire faith-based theological paradigm is unwelcome in my world of math and numbers and "hard" science (that includes life sciences, BTW).

What really IS sad? My company has an R&D department, and the highly credentialed scientists I hire come in from other parts of the market making between 60 and 80K a year, often with Masters in Computer or Management science, and a handful with PhDs or double PhDs, and Masters in Math is about 40K.

The programmers and developers that work for me with undergrad degrees or even just experience-equivalents make about 30 percent more AT market. It is what it is - ironically in the market I don't have a good way to fairly equalize that pay in any meaningful way without becoming uncompetitive, other than to give a different set of benefits to the credentialed guys (i.e., more vacation, different vesting schedule, etc.).

I DO agree if education was made available to more and significantly more affordable, we would have an entirely different workforce and set of priorities for how we value that workforce than we do today.

It is shocking that the most rigorous disciplines pay the least, while I pay above market for the right talent.

[ellenfl]

2. teachers have always been underpaid in this country.

first because they were mostly women and subsequently because our leaders don't want an educated citizenry . . . and it's just too easy to take money from kids. for the last 40 years, i have been saying (to deaf ears) that teachers should be our highest paid professionals. as long as we continue to revere celebrity and money, teachers will continue to get short shrift. perhaps we would be better off now, if we had lost the revolutionary war.

ellen fl

[knitter4democracy]

3. Of course, but then there's the problem of economy of scale.

There are just too many of us. In order to have the right teacher:student ratio, you have to hire millions. Whenever you have that many that cost that much, you start cutting, either their salaries and benefits or numbers or both.

What I've never understood, to be honest, is the seriously big money administrators make. I can understand paying them well, sure, but several times the salary of a first year teacher? That makes no sense to me, especially since they're often a huge part of the problem.

[MadHound]

4. Actually you would only have to hire approximately one million teachers

Doing the math, if you paid all those teachers, approximately four million of them, six figure salaries, salaries that are comparable with doctors, the price would be $400,000,000,000. Hmm, I think that we could come up with that from the spare change jar located over at the Pentagon.

But then again, educating kids doesn't pay out those big bucks to the wealthy and elite like war does.

[knitter4democracy]

6. We'd have to seriously scale back the DOD budget.

As we've been told, that's never going to happen. *sigh*

You do know, though, that doctors keep their numbers deliberately low, right? Each med school is only allowed to seat and graduate a specific number decided upon by their accreditation service. They keep their numbers low so their salaries stay high. We teachers keep our numbers low but don't get the salary benefit.

[MadHound]

8. Not just scale back the DOD budget,

But local and state revenues would have to be raised, and perhaps reappropriated. The trouble is that this anti-education sentiment starts at home, and a lot of people refuse to vote for school bonds because they simply don't want to pay for education.

What is needed is a paradigm shift in how our country thinks about education, and while that might happen if we put some effort into it, it certainly won't happen with the current political leadership unleashing a war against public education.

[knitter4democracy]

7. Weird computer glitch and dupe.

Sorry.

[Demeter]

5. Equally Sad Is the Fate of Engineering Grads

Peak out after 5 years, get laid off or outsourced by 40, then what?

[MadHound]

9. kick n/t