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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is it because both occupations are mainly performed by women, and women are not valued as highly as men?[/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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