Why are teachers and nurses underpaid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is it because both occupations are mainly performed by women, and women are not valued as highly as men?

On a regular risk-adjusted, selection-adjusted, cost-adjusted basis, teachers are often very well-paid.

Most people who can handle college and want to be teachers can at least start out being teachers, without going through a tough weedout process. That’s probably the equivalent of a weedout adjustment of about 200 percent. (Kids who start college aiming to be teachers are at least two times as likely to achieve their goals as premeds, pre-engineers or big-law pre-laws are.)

Teachers can typically get hired with a one-year master’s. That means they get a $2,000 to $5,000 per year income bump over a 40-year career, and maybe a $4,000 to $15,000 per year bump, if you include interest costs and the value of two extra years of ability to work full time.

K-12 teachers can go through layoffs, but they’re less likely to go through a layoff than engineers, and they don’t face the weedout process law firm associates face.

Also, big-law lawyers get big salaries, but most law school grads are lucky to make $60,000 starting out. Engineers earn high starting salaries but tend to have short careers.

So, certainly, some lawyers do very well, but many lawyers are like Saul in Better Call Saul on a bad day. They’re seriously screwed. They are much more poor than a teacher with a master’s degree and 20 years of tenure.

I think any given teacher who’s making $70,000 after 20 years is the economic equivalent of a lawyer with 20 years of experience who’s making $150,000. And, in my area, teachers with 20 years of experience and master’s degrees make $100,000 or more.

Nurses face a tougher weeding out process than teachers and, in many cases, more education bills, but they earn about as much as small-law lawyers, and they’re probably about five times less likely to face weeding out than premeds. And they face much less marketing and practice management stress than doctors, along with drastically lower education and insurance costs and loss-of-work-year losses.

So, sure, nurses earn less than doctors, but a group of 100 college freshman premeds and a group of 100 college freshman pre-nursing students will probably end up with comparable lifetime cohort earnings in the targeted profession, once you add in adjustments for weeding out risk, education costs, student loan interest, malpractice insurance costs, etc.

In other words: a neurologist might be doing great, but, if you average her after-education income with the income of five of her premed friends who failed to become doctors, that average income is probably comparable to the weedout-adjusted income of a nurse or K-12 teacher.

Over 40% of new teachers quit and join other professions within 5 years. Aspiring teachers may not be weeded out of education programs, but the first few years are a real test of endurance and ability.

[Anonymous]

Teachers are not universally underpaid. Nurses are able to greatly increase income with higher levels of education, which teachers really can’t do by the same scale. Not all nurses are the same. Some have AA, some have PhD. Some are in a specialized field. You’re using a big umbrella. That’s like saying your Level 1 help desk consultant is underpaid because Software Developers make so much more money.

Also, you can’t base what someone should be paid by their level of formal education. That is one of many qualifications to obtain income. I see people on here all the time complaining about engineering salaries and I recently switched but previously worked for 20 years with engineers (all types from Civil, Aerospace, Mechanical, Chemical, Nuclear, Electrical….) and they all made good money. The degree qualifies you for something but it’s not the only thing that does that. Teachers in MoCo have to have a degree. That degree gets them something. Other fields have other qualifications that are required. Saying someone has a 1-year Masters and that should get them money is dumb. It’s actually a dumb thing to say. It discounts so many other factors. I have a Bachelors in CS and when I graduated I made more than most Psychologists with Doctorate level education. Remember the law of supply and demand?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

[Anonymous]

No profession is underpaid. All professions operate under supply and demand.

You individually might feel like you are underpaid. If you are switch careers to a job that is in higher demand with a higher salary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

When i was a teen in CA 20 years ago, one whacky old history teacher spent 80% of each class session just talking about random things, like he was chatting. He made 77k and drove a semitruck on weekends for a lot of extra money. He said he made 120k total a year doing this. This was 20 years ago.

[Anonymous]

I think some teachers are underpaid. As a teacher myself, I would like to see a system of bonuses for high quality teachers who produce results. I understand. It would be difficult to design an objective measurement.

Teaching really does attract a lot of low performing people. It is detrimental to our society. The worst part is that the excellent teachers grow bitter because we are paid the same as the low performers.

I have said this before on this forum, I work with a lot of idiots. It is embarrassing how dumb some of my coworkers are and what is worse us that they are teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

“Fewer days”.

Are you saying a teacher gets 78 days of leave a year plus holidays? Just some quick math here, but that wouldn’t be only about 33 weeks of work? 365 days minus weekends = 255, minus just the 78 days and they’d be at 177. Their contracts in Fairfax are 195 days. I have a brother in a different VA county who teaches and his is 200 days. Still a good amount of time off, but not nearly triple.

[Anonymous]

I’d paid more for our teacher hires if I could see their high school and college transcripts plus any other fulltime work experience.

Best hire we made was a female computer programmer with 20 years of work experience. We hired her during her last maternity leave. She taught AP calc AB and BC and regular algebra for 30 years. She retires next year, at age 65. Her students stay in touch over the years and have gone on to have fantastic stem and in stem careers. Should be quite the party, am going to start soliciting Congratulations cards from alums in a few months.

She had great command of the classroom, great efficacy at explaining math proofs, and she wasn’t afraid to tell the class to “Listen up, she didn’t leave her 6 figure career to see teens fail themselves.”

[Anonymous]

I'm a nurse. Nurses in this area are definitely underpaid- I made the same salary in Texas and didn't have to pay income tax and overall cost of living was much lower even though property tax was higher because property is cheap there. I think nurses are underpaid because there's so many of us- it would seriously put the hospital out of business to pay ALL of us much more (or make healthcare costs that much greater).

[Anonymous]

I think nurses feel underpaid because of chronic understaffing, particularly in hospitals. So are you underpaid if you are doing the work of two people but being paid for one? Yes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Where I live a new teacher makes something like $40k and the 50+ teachers are making between $80 and $90k. To me this discrepancy seems unfair because the young teacher's job is just as difficult as the older teacher.
With nurses I understand this a bit more because an experienced nurse will have to pick up a lot of slack if her coworkers are brand new and clueless.

For teachers the discrepancies are reasonable because it should be about results, not how hard they work. Teachers straight out of college are not very good the first year or two. This is a pretty universal truth and it’s veteran teachers’ support that gets many of those new teachers through the year. Especially at schools with high levels of poverty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think some teachers are underpaid. As a teacher myself, I would like to see a system of bonuses for high quality teachers who produce results. I understand. It would be difficult to design an objective measurement.

Teaching really does attract a lot of low performing people. It is detrimental to our society. The worst part is that the excellent teachers grow bitter because we are paid the same as the low performers.

I have said this before on this forum, I work with a lot of idiots. It is embarrassing how dumb some of my coworkers are and what is worse us that they are teachers.

+1 students can tell too. As can parents.

[Anonymous]

I remember zoom school. The 2nd teacher, aged 27, had tons of misspellings and math errors whilst teaching. I viewed them as a slacker who just wanted a sleeper job. Not like kids are going to do anything, or the school. Schools keep poorly performing teachers all the time.

They ended up quitting to live abroad doing peace corp or something similar. Left in the middle of the school year as well. Very professional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember zoom school. The 2nd teacher, aged 27, had tons of misspellings and math errors whilst teaching. I viewed them as a slacker who just wanted a sleeper job. Not like kids are going to do anything, or the school. Schools keep poorly performing teachers all the time.

They ended up quitting to live abroad doing peace corp or something similar. Left in the middle of the school year as well. Very professional.

My question to you and the PP is how do we attract and retain those you would consider to be higher quality teachers?

[Anonymous]

They are NOT underpaid. Supply and demand