<p>There’s a lot here, so here’s the short version of my response:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Teachers are tremendously important, so if you want to do something important, go on and be the teacher you want to be. Kids need good teachers. The best way to help prepare your kids to ace their tests and get into top colleges is to be a good teacher, find out about resources to refer them to for cheap and low-cost test prep, and care about your students’ lives. Not getting a JD or PhD.</p></li>
<li><p>You don’t learn “real skills” in school. You learn them as you do. So don’t go to grad or law school expecting to learn “real skills” because that’s not how it works.</p></li>
<li><p>You get a JD because you want to be a lawyer. You get a linguistics PhD because you want to be a lingustics professor. You don’t get either because you want to be well-reputed or viewed as “flawless” or to honor your family. Those things come with hard work, not just letters after your name.</p></li>
<li><p>Your cooperating teacher is amazing because she’s had 15 or 20 or more years to build a great career. When you are her age, assuming that you do amazing things, you too can be a role model for students.</p></li>
<li><p>If you become a lawyer or a professor, you will not have TIME to “tutor on the side.” If you are passionate about teaching children, then teach children.</p></li>
<li><p>The bottom line is, though, with an advanced degree, I would be rightly perceived as an educated person and not an expendable laborer. - If you really believe this, take a look at the academic and law job markets right now. Google a couple of articles about them.</p></li>
</ol>
<hr>
<p>Different people have different paths and roles in life. You’re judging your cooperating teacher from a position 1) outside of her life and 2) most likely much younger and earlier in your career. Perhaps she is in her 40s or 50s, or older; she’s had an entire career to do things that inspire you. She’s built up the social and career capital necessary to get on the board of a top college or whatever. You have time to do all of that, too - you’re only 27. You have 23 years to go before you are 50 - and you will only be at the midway point of your career, then. Imagine what you can do in 23 years!</p>
<p>But if you are getting an M.Ed to be a teacher…well, that’s great too, and you can have a huge impact that way. My husband and I went to high school together, and we frequently talk about the huge impact that some of our best teachers have had on our lives. My high school English teacher encouraged me to apply to college, even though I was first-generation and no one in my family had gone and I knew nothing about it. My high school calculus teacher made me love math; my high school history teacher made me understand how to be critical and analyze the world. Without them I wouldn’t be the person I am today. Kids NEED good teachers. And people remember their best teachers. Ask any adult today about their favorite teacher from high school - at any age - and I bet you every one of them can tell you, probably even produce a name.</p>
<p>If you want to be someone important, being a good teacher is one of the most important things you can do. If you want to begin or get involved in a program like the one your cooperating teacher runs, you don’t need a PhD or a JD to do that. You can do that with an M.Ed and some seed money and dedicated investors or other volunteers or whatnot. If you want to fight for teachers, become an activist. You don’t need a JD to do that either. Get involved with the teachers’ union and start organizing. Maybe no one will ever give you a medal or you’ll never be on the cover of TIME, but that’s not what’s important. If you touch and change the lives of people in a positive way, <em>that’s</em> what’s important. Focus on that, not on prestige. Reputation comes when you do good things.</p>
<p>Teaching colleges prepare you to start teaching. Again, your cooperating teacher has a whole career behind her - she’s a coop teacher because she has more experience than you. You’re not going to be as good a teacher as her your first year out, and you aren’t supposed to be! It’s time and experience that adds that on. You learn as you go, and as you teach more and more years you get better and better. Maybe on down the line you will decide to become an administrator, or maybe you will get a PhD in education and teach other teachers how to teach.</p>
<p>Why are you thinking of pursuing another career? Is it for the reputation, the prestige? You don’t become not-average by the letters behind your name; you become that way by doing inspirational and above-average things. If you already have $100,000 in student loans, getting a JD is only going to add at least another $150,000 to that, and you don’t even want to be a lawyer. A JD also does not teach you real skills; it teaches you to think like a lawyer. You learn the skills on the job.</p>
<p>And if you think a PhD program will teach you real skills, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. PhDs are research programs; they teach you to be a researcher and to think like an academic. If you learn real skills, it’s almost by accident - or because you relentlessly pursued them on top of the 60+ hours a week of stuff you already have to do. (Case in point: I chose to do a 40-hour-a-week corporate internship during my PhD program to get non-academic experience. But I still had tons of research work to do - it wouldn’t have been acceptable for me to just halt my PhD work to do this internship - so my life that summer consisted of working 8 or 9 hours a day at the internship and then coming home and doing work until I went to sleep at 11. I took off a half-day Saturday but worked through the weekend on research.)</p>
<p>Finally…I’m not being rude, just realistic. But why would you expect a top school to accept you with average grades, average scores, and zero experience in either of the things you want to do? Grad/law students at top programs spend years preparing for that. I am getting my PhD at an Ivy and I spent 2.5 years gaining research experience, plus I had top GRE scores and a high major GPA. Grad programs are SUPER competitive these days. You can’t just decide one day that you want to get a PhD and decide the next to apply and then get in. If you really wanted to get a PhD in linguistics, likely you would need to take the next 3ish years getting research experience by volunteering with a linguistics professor. Or given you have average grades, you may have to get an MA in linguistics (adding another $100,000 to your debt) before you could be competitive for a PhD. And law students who go to top 15 law schools have tip-top grades - 3.7+, usually, and very very high LSAT scores - so you’d have to expend a lot of time and energy improving your LSAT scores and even then you might not be competitive because of your grades.</p>