Going to a stellar college "just to be a teacher"

Parents Forum
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<p>Well, you know, bopper, if your daughter is a math teacher she will be employable in plenty of places. We live in the same state and just finished the hiring process for my daughter. She loves her job with all her heart and has an excellent salary and benefits. Her salary is the same or better than her friends who are starting out as CPAs. She is able to use her skills, talents and enjoy different experiences and personalities. Your daughter could do much worse than becoming a teacher. I just personally think it’s a bad idea for students to have huge debt if they have to immediately live independently. However, I am very risk adverse as a rule, so no one should go by me.</p>

<p>My D’s best friend is a math teacher (starting out this year) and she had job interviews all the way up until the start of school (as did my D), and they both had their choice of jobs. But teachers who aren’t special ed or math/science have no hiring track in NYC.</p>

<p>I’m sure your daughter is already familiar with the olasjobs.org website and I’m sure she will be in great shape to get a job.</p>

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<p>Oh, I know Math teachers are in demand. I was happy my DD knew what she wanted to major in, knew what career path she wants and is doing very well in school! She still has to get into a grad school to get her teaching degree. I will pass along the olasjobs.org site to her.</p>

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<p>thumper, I in no way mean to bash teachers; I work at the school and have lived in this town well over 20 years, grew up in a nearby town. I was a big volunteer for the school then got a job as a paraprofessional, fancy name for instructional aide. I have a lot of respect for the teachers, many are my friends. My son attended the school till high school and then he went to another school which offered more. I have always said the teachers, the school, helped me raise my son. </p>

<p>However, when I write about the goings on in the district, it’s the truth. I’m not saying the teachers get medical at retirement, but when they are working they’re getting free medical. It is one of the better or best jobs in our area. I just raise the issue because people seem to think $50,000 isn’t a lot of money, but if you add in the benefits and retirement package, it adds up. Maybe not a lot in some people’s eyes, but it’s more than just the salary.</p>

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<p>I personally think teachers should be the best educated people in the world. It would be nice if top tier schools would give special merit aids to students who would commit to teach X years.</p>

<p>Just a side note…A friend of mine got a maters degree in education from Harvard. When she was teaching at a private school in NYC, she used to get a lot of requests to tutor at 150+/hr.</p>

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<p>I posted earlier I was probably willing to pay for private for my D, in part due to her specialized circumstances. The recent posts made me think more about OP’s question and our local school district. I live in rural Hooterville, school K-12 = 893 students.</p>

<p>This district most definitely favors their own graduates…many of the teachers graduated from this or a neighboring district and so did both principals. That appears to be deemed much more important than any other factor, including which college they attended.</p>

<p>Since D wants to be a math teacher, I’m sending her to Zooserland :slight_smile: Teachers here start about $29,000; accounting majors $55,000 (before earning CPA). However, I do strongly feel, <em>for my area</em>, career teaching pays well and better than most other jobs available here. Due to tenure they also have more job security than other area jobs. So…I’m good with her being a math teacher. Now we just need to do the merit aid dance so she can graduate with little debt!</p>

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<p>S was math major/physics minor at a top-ten LAC. He took out Stafford loans to help pay for sophomore and junior years, and then received a scholarship for STEM majors interested in careers in urban education. The scholarship paid for senior year and a post-bac year to do student teaching and classes to get teaching certificates. He loved the student teaching at a city public HS, and fully expected to work there. Unfortunately, the urban district had a budget crisis and couldn’t hire him, so he sent resumes out to suburban districts where his alma mater and his dual certification made him a desirable candidate. He had a choice of physics teaching jobs, and is now at a very highly regarded public HS with a starting salary of over $50k (before mandatory withdrawals for being mentored, union dues, medical insurance, and pension). He won’t have any trouble paying off his loans if he stays in his current position, but his scholarship would turn into hefty loans–the equivalent of two years of private college tuition. He still hopes to go back to the city in a year or two. He enjoys his job, but finds the 'burbs less than exciting for a 20-something.</p>

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<p>sryrstress, is it possible that the applicant pool is made up primarily of Hooterville and neighboring district graduates? For a starting salary of $29,000, I wouldn’t expect many external applicants from elite colleges to be seeking employment in a tiny rural district unknown to them.</p>

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<p>What I’ve noticed s how dramatically teachers’ salaries vary. I have one friend who started at $26,500 in a rural school district; many of the districts in my state start around $45,000; one friend made $70,000 by age 30 in LA; and in many districts nearby, ten-year teachers make over $80k. </p>

<p>The overarching similarity is that you’ll never get rich doing it, and you lack the few super-high earning years that some professions have. But you can start earning a decent salary at a young age, which is enormously helpful.</p>

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<p>I think children deserve good teachers. They deserve teachers who think critically and have been exposed to modes of learning and thought that encourage creative teaching; they deserve teachers who have been exposed to a wide range of things, and who can in turn expose them to those things. My personal example is a calculus and physics teacher who made me love those two subjects because he was an engineer, trained a top engineering college, and so he ditched our abstract book and wrote his own homework and test problems that were based on real-life examples of what you use calculus and calculus-based physics for in engineering. My husband is a Columbia GS student, and he wants to teach math, too.</p>

<p>Secondly, teachers’ earnings aren’t the best but the average starting salary for most teachers (which ranges between $35,000 to $45,000 in most school districts I’ve glanced at) isn’t actually that much different from the average starting salary in other fields (see [url=&lt;a href=“http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf]this[/url”&gt;http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf]this[/url</a>] survey conducted by Georgetown. You can see here that the average starting salary for most fields is right around $30,000 anyway, and the only majors that make substantially more than that are computers & mathematics and engineering.) For example, new teachers in DC with just a bachelor’s start at $51,000 and top out at near six figures. In my suburban Atlanta hometown, new teachers make $40,000 to start out with, which is the average starting salary for most undergraduate business majors. I’m not saying that teachers are rolling it in, but at least to begin with, they aren’t making much less than their friends who chose other lines of work, except for their friends in engineering.</p>

<p>Plus, those who go into educational management (assistant principal and principal positions) can expect to make more - principals in my hometown start out at $83,000. And my former high school principal is now an assistant area superintendent of my county, and his salary is $111,000.</p>

<p>I really don’t see any difference between my (hypothetical) daughter wanting to attend Duke because she wants to major in English and be a teacher and my daughter wanting to attend Duke because she wants to major in English, but has no idea what she wants to do.</p>

<p>Students, in general, should avoid untenable debt. I’m also a huge fan of saving money, and not being swayed by institutional “prestige” or reputation (as opposed to actual value, educational quality, and opportunities. E.g., Harvard is not necessarily better than your state flagship <em>for you</em>, especially if your state flagship is UCLA or Michigan or UVa). But beyond that, I think the choice should be up to other factors.</p>

<p>I also have a serious problem us, as a society, deciding that certain careers “deserve” private education but the people who teach our children don’t. Of course you don’t “need” a private university degree to be a teacher, but you don’t need one to do the vast majority of jobs that students want to do. You can go to med, law, dental, or any grad school from the state flagship; you can be an accountant or an IT guy or a middle manager from your state flagship, too.</p>

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<p>The difference in starting salary is not so stark as the difference in max salary. Most teachers top out at about $60,000 unless they go into administration or can teach at a university. So after 30 years of experience and a college degree…you’re making $60,000. The truth is that there are fields that are less lucrative than others requiring a degree…teaching is one.</p>

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<p>Not to mention the cumulative negative effects of dealing with lack of institutional support from the local educational bureaucracy, having to deal with exceedingly disruptive/violent “not my angel”/neglectful type parents and their children…especially in crime-ridden schools across the US*, hassles of managing a classroom of K-12 students where one has to cope/manage without the option of requesting/ordering a student to leave if his/her behavior is such that it disrupts the learning or worse…jeopardizes the safety of the rest of the class & teacher, local citizens demanding teachers be responsible for problems which are IMO really the domain of the parents and to some extent…larger societal support for parents at the margins and yet…complaining about having to actually pay what IMO is a low salary considering all the additional responsibilities that get dumped on them by the rest of society. </p>

<p>Those were factors which caused burnout in many new teachers before their first five years…including several friends. </p>

<p>And no…the summer vacation period isn’t necessarily a good trade-off…especially considering many schoolteachers are working during that period through taking required continuing ed courses, going to educational conferences/workshops, going to other mandatory meetings, wondering if they’ll be working the following year if they’re not tenured yet/district has financial issues, etc. </p>

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<li>Some educators/concerned citizens have proposed extra pay for teachers being assigned to really difficult school districts…especially schools with known serious crime/poverty issues. Considering all the crap I’ve seen the good teachers at my NYC public middle school have to put up with from the future felon bullies** who were known to the local cops, they certainly deserved at least that much and more.<br></li>
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<p>** Called them that because due to efforts by some school teachers/admins and their parents to shelter them, they escalated their already serious crimes to the point they all ended up serving serious time at Rikers or prisons upstate due to felonies committed in high school. Many of them were still there as of a few years ago according to old teachers and local cops who are still in the department from the time I was in middle school.</p>

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The top salary here is just over $100,000 with a very generous pension. Well-deserved, of course, but this isn’t a terrible financial path. Particularly for a teacher who may prefer to teach summer school in some years which is another $4-5,000, then there is test prep, which is another couple of thousand, depending, and also teachers who supervise certain activities can expect to make more. Not the most lucrative field, but my D (who started out the same as her CPA best friend) will eventually be happy with her salary and more importantly for her, she will have a schedule that makes sense for her aspirations and it will be a stable schedule. The best friend will make magnitudes of more money, but her schedule is already nuts. During tax season, she gets put up in a hotel for days at a time, and she gets four weeks vacation while my D gets four months. My D was a very good student who seriously considered environmental science and has the science classes up to organic chemistry to prove it, but is happy with her choice. Right now she is planning the M&M costumes for her students to wear in the school Halloween parade. She is joyful and her kids know it. How could that be bad?</p>

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<p>In many cases, the larger salaries are in high cost of living areas. we live in one of those areas. My salary alone as a starting teacher here would NOT have been sufficient to live alone. And at that time, my salary was such that I qualified for reduced lunch and food stamps…no kidding.</p>

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That’s where we are, too. My D could live alone, but she would be just making it. Which is why I think it’s wise to either have little (no?) debt or get your first job in a place where you can either live at home for a while or have a roommate. D is at home for another year and plans to buy herself a small condo at the end of that time. Had she chosen either debt or another location (or both) it would have affected her financial security for years to come.</p>

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<p>If she’s a NYC public school teacher, those 4 months in practice are likely to be less as some of that will be used for required continuing ed classes, educational conferences/workshops, other mandated meetings, etc.</p>

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<p>No, cobrat, they aren’t. It is exactly what I said it is based on my knowledge of my own daughter’s personal situation right here in 2013. As opposed to some random “people” of decades past.</p>

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<p>Zoosermom,</p>

<p>Actually, that’s from having several friends who are currently teaching in the NYC and other urban public school systems as of 2013. </p>

<p>While teachers do get much more vacation than those in other careers, in practice…a not insignificant portion is taken up with those required work-related meetings/tasks I mentioned above. Not saying their vacation time is worse than others after the fact…just that it isn’t necessarily as long of a free vacation period as the greater public thinks.</p>

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<p>The teacher is an actual person who lives in my home.</p>

<p>I know her schedule. I know what continuing ed she has done or needs to do. I know how her particular school handles meetings. You are the greater public. I am the mother. I know what I am talking about with regard to my daughter’s choices and history. You don’t.</p>

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<p>And the teachers are close friends I’ve known in some cases since before high school with whom I correspond and hang out with on at least a weekly basis. </p>

<p>Oftentimes, I hear about them having to attend various mandatory meetings or taking mandatory continuing ed courses in the summers to conform to their job requirements. Especially when it means they can’t join us on an outing because of those summer obligations.</p>

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<p>Cobrat, it took me years in the corporate world to qualify for four weeks vacation, and I have never taken it all (even when I plan to). So chill. Sounds like heaven to me to get the summer off- even if I have to take a day here and there for professional development and licensing requirements.</p>