<p>Interestingly, a family member of ours created the opposite situation for her daughter. She pigeon holed her into a teaching profession by pushing into a BA/credential program so narrowly focused that she really has no training/education to do anything else. Her daughter really had no say in this and it’s no wonder that now she’s looking to marry and move out of state.</p>
<p>Major in math/cs and keep your options open for a career in teaching. It’s something you definitely have to “try before you buy.”. I was a teacher’s aide during college and that’s what convinced me to teach after earning my degree in psych.</p>
<p>Lilmom makes a good point. A college education should open up possibilities, not narrow them down. There are many routes toward becoming a teacher, fortunately.</p>
<p>I can’t help but thinking of the history teacher at my DS’s Catholic high school, who can’t be making much money (think PUBLIC school teachers are underpaid?). Yet he made a connection with the this HS freshman who had never shown an interest in anything except video games and football and turned him on to history. We spent last school year almost every evening at the supper table getting a blow-by-blow account of what the day’s lesson in world history had been. Then last month, this 15 year old kid goes to the library, completely unprompted, takes out a book, and sits down and reads it in a week. The book? Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Why? “Mr. S. said he thinks this is one of the best books ever written, and I wanted to see what it was about.”</p>
<p>(Now if we could just ignite his interest in math, science, and English!)</p>
<p>She did not “give back” on our dime. She gave back on hers. She could have gotten a job i-banking or doing something else, she chose to live a more modest life and teach and work for a non-profit. One of our kids once asked us if we were waiting for her to get a more lucrative job to “pay us back” for her education. DH said, “She doesn’t owe us anything.” In our family, we helped our kids go to college. What they owed us for that, in our opinion, was to take advantage of that education. She did. She worked incredibly hard in college, got all kinds of honors and distinctions and made full use of the money we spent in order for her to get what we paid for - an education. If, five years from now, she chooses to step out of the work force for fifteen years to raise a family, that will be fine with us because it is HER life, not ours. Paying for her education did not entitle us to dictate the rest of the choices she makes in her life. Few people know what they will want to do when they enter college. If you think you get to tell your kids what field to go into, you’d darn well better make sure they know that when they accept the education, so there are no big surprises later.</p>
<p>Huh? Are you stalking me? Where have I said I have a father with multimillions of dollars waiting in the wings? My father has been successful – and his money is HIS to enjoy in his retirement, not mine in any way. I was fortunate to have been full-pay … and I’ve supported myself fully the moment I graduated from college. </p>
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<p>Are you suggesting that if I pay for my kids at elite schools, they are obligated to pay me back somehow, or support me in my old age? Their education is a GIFT I give them. They can go work for the Peace Corps or Goldman Sachs for all I care. I’m not going to be taking one dime of their eventual salaries, so their eventual salaries are their concern, not mine. What sense of entitlement do you have to your kids’ eventual salaries?</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice everyone. My parents are paying for my education - we get a good amount of financial aid, but I don’t think it’s terribly easy for them. So that’s why I’m kind of feeling guilty, if I were paying for it, or got a scholarship or whatever, it wouldn’t matter at all. And then before coming here, I’m not really sure what the expectations were - teaching was definitely a consideration, but I’ve always wanted to go for a PhD and I might have just left at that. I don’t really remember, it wasn’t really a big deal. Also, I’m still going to be a math/cs major (my school doesn’t have an education major), and my parents are fine with that, if that wasn’t really clear in my OP.</p>
<p>Also, I just looked up salaries for teaching in the big cities, like NYC, Boston, DC, and the salaries seemed pretty high actually - like if you have a masters then you start off at 50k, and can end up at almost 100k at the end of your career. Is there some sort of catch I’m missing? Also, the NYC schedule included information about having just a bachelors, but I thought you needed a masters to teach in New York?</p>
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<p>About this, I was mostly thinking about getting jobs after graduation. Everything I’ve heard sounds really bad - like MIT PhDs aren’t even able to get jobs at community colleges sort of thing. Though I’m still pretty unsure about getting into PhD programs in the first place.</p>
<p>^Well, if you wanted to be free with your choices, you should have gone to UG on Full tuition / Full ride Merit scholarship. Since it si too late to think about it, I would graduate with whatever, get a job and try to continue with education on your own or employer’s expense. I had my BS and Master’s covered by various employers and it is much more relaxing when you are working, college is more on background.<br>
As far as Grad. School goes, it is very possible to get into. Do not listen to anybody, my friends’ S. was accepted few months ago. They pay for education and give him a stipend to live on. So, he is independent of his parents, but they always had a great releationship and he went to UG on full tuition Merit award.</p>
<p>If teaching gets old there is always time to move into administration which can pay well into the six figures. Usually have to get an advanced degree but those are not that tough and school will pay all or part.</p>
<p>Well…the costs of living in NY, DC area and Boston are mighty pricey.</p>
<p>Barrons…do you have a degree in educational administration? I took some courses towards that degree but decided not to continue that as I didn’t WANT to be an administrator. The course of study for administrators in education and the required practicums are not a walk in the park.</p>
<p>Thank you for asking, Pizzagirl. No I do not believe I have any entitlement to my son’s future income(post 66). I’ll also repeat that I don’t have a right to put controls on a gift I give(unless I suppose I give what is called a conditional gift), but the OP has not made any mention of that. And we are talking here-at least I am- of what the OP’s parents may be thinking if they’re disappointed in student’s choice given the cost of student’s education. How I believe personally may or may not be how the Op’s parents are thinking.
For further clarification, I invite you to revisit my post 50, where I give a couple examples of gifts given with certain expectations, and in my examples, something very different occurs than the expectations. In those examples I believe I demonstrate that a person has a right to be disappointed with what the recipient does with a gift.</p>
<p>Please don’t equate “try to give back” with “obligated to pay back”. They are not the same thing. To hint that I define them as the same is to wrongly state my position.</p>
<p>Warbrain, if you are willing to live outside of Massachusetts, you can get a job with a Ph.D. in mathematics, and a pretty good one at that. In my field, the unemployment rate for Ph.D.'s is around 2%. I would imagine that it’s fairly similar in mathematics. I do sympathize with people who have some sort of restrictions that prevent them from relocating. I think a lot of dual-career couples think of Boston as a great place to look for positions, because there are a large number of possibilities there. But there are also a large number of dual-career couples going after them. The actual odds of dual faculty employment may be much higher elsewhere.</p>
<p>On the horror stories note…DD had a Ph.D. math prof who was on a contract that ended this year at her university. She thought he was a really good teacher (she’s pretty critical). She also said that he was having a hard time landing a tenure track position.</p>
<p>And talking about CCs–Keep in mind that most Ph.D.s in math would not want a community college position because the levels of math taught are pretty low.</p>
<p>One does not have the **right **to pick the major but one has the obligation to figure out - with brutal honesty - from a very early age what the child is good at, and where they can succeed. Once such skills are identified, planting the idea in a 9th or 10th grader’s head (plus a few choice classes in high school) should be easy.</p>
<p>Also, if the parents aren’t paying for the degree, the student is free to study whatever they want. With a scholarship, a BFA in Elbonian Basket Weaving sounds good.</p>
<p>One does not have the right to pick the major but one has the obligation to figure out - “with brutal honesty - from a very early age what the child is good at, and where they can succeed. Once such skills are identified, planting the idea in a 9th or 10th grader’s head (plus a few choice classes in high school) should be easy.”</p>
<p>Eeeewwww. This is America. We don’t pick our children’s careers here.</p>
<p>I’m kind of stunned I guess. I’ve had some kids with “multi-potentiality” – they could succeed in all kinds of areas. What to do in such a case? Obviously, too late for DD who threw it all away to go into education, but DS has one more year of high school left. Maybe it’s time to reign him in from all the varied activities he’s involved with and steer him in one direction. Are you somehow equating Elbonian Basket Weaving with the OP’s desire to teach math in a country where we have a real problem with kids not mastering math?</p>
<p>Warbrain, something to consider, and I think others mentioned this, is to get your math/cs degree, even your PhD., then if you want to teach to go through an alternative certification program. My state has this for many subject areas. I worked for 14 years in hospital labs and then began a career in teaching through an alternative certification program. You start teaching right away and spend 2-3 years getting the necessary requirements done, which includes a lot of coursework. These teachers bring a wealth of real-life experience with them - in our school, these teachers include a PhD in plant genetics, a teacher with a masters in animal husbandry who worked on a hog farm, and a former CSI. Teach for America is a great program, but I do have former students who did this who were put in tough teaching positions - very low performing inner city schools. If this is your gift, this is great, but it may be hard for someone with no teaching experience. Check with the Departments of Education in states you are interested in working for alternative certification programs.</p>
<p>mimk6, great post #77
The only element of it I’d question is your reference to the OP’s desire to teach math at the high school level.</p>
<p>It seems to me, unless I am misreading the original post, that the OP’s true desire is to get a Ph.D. in mathematics, and (presumably) to become a professor. But the OP is concerned that it will be difficult/impossible to get a job.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to downplay the difficulties of finding an academic position. Still, if the OP really wants to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics (and has done reasonably well at a top 25 school), there is no reason that it’s out of the question.</p>
<p>I think warbrain should give the original plan a try. As collegealum314 pointed out, there are many employment options available to a math Ph.D. </p>
<p>Also, while the OP would still be a student, most math Ph.D. programs will pay the tuition for the student, and offer a stipend in the $25,000-$30,000 category. The option of teaching at the K-12 level would still be available afterwards.</p>
<p>Oh, I read it differently, that he was now considering that he might like teaching high school math. In a later post he talks about the salary, etc. of public school teachers. It seems he is seriously considering teaching high school for a number of reasons. But maybe I am misreading it.</p>