Jobs with higher purpose but lower income

I got paid zippo for being a full-time, stay-at-home mom. I also homeschooled our ds for six and a half years. That also paid nothing, but I suppose that isn’t considered a, “job,” as the word is being used on this thread.

I definitely felt raising my ds had a higher purpose, and I did not view myself as replaceable.

Defining words is interesting, isn’t it?

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I addressed students interested in education careers at my (fancy private) high school’s career day a few years back. A student asked this question. I said:

“Decide now that you won’t live in New York or San Francisco.”

You could throw Boston, Seattle, and DC in there nowadays, but really, this is the difference between having a comfortable life and not having one. I don’t need a condo in Vail, a Mercedes, or first-class flights to be comfortable. I do need a second bathroom.

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It’s not just supply and demand - ever notice how jobs that are, or started as, traditionally women’s professions pay less? Nurses, teachers, social workers…

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They are often paid by employers that are not profit making. Even hospitals are often public/private partnerships I think.

The alternative is to go for jobs that pay the highest salaries, as opposed to going into a profession where the entity paying you is not making serious money for itself, and can’t afford to pay you seriously. You can’t fight the world – you need to go with the flow. Can’t expect a non profit to pay like Goldman Sachs

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There was an excellent analysis in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago combing through longitudinal data on teaching (did not address nursing and social work- they have different structural issues). What they concluded (mind you- this is the WSJ) that a conscious decision by the teacher’s unions to expand the number of teachers (which means more union members) over trying to advocate for higher salaries had dealt a serious blow to any movement to increase teacher’s salaries around the country.

Very sad (and cynical) view of the union leadership- but I must say, it jives with what many of us see. A constant emphasis on reducing class size even when the evidence suggests that there is no meaningful difference between a class of 20 fourth graders vs. a class of 17 first graders. Except that if every grade reduces its class size- more teachers are needed.

So yes- it is supply and demand Rookie- except that the three positions you cited are not free market professions. Teachers need certification. Nurses need certification. Social workers need a Master’s degree. Every barrier to entry in every profession is going to cause the supply/demand curve to get distorted. Sometimes it means salaries are HIGHER (certainly the case for doctors where limiting access to med school, controlling residency slots, etc. reduces the supply and so the price goes higher) and sometimes it means salaries are LOWER (if you believe the journal, this is the impact the teacher’s unions have had on salaries by deprioritizing compensation as a union goal). And in social work it’s possible that social workers fight for other things besides higher salaries- more flexibility in work hours, job security and severance, etc. And because there aren’t bright lines as to what a social worker can do vs. other professions (no hospital will allow a clerical worker to administer anesthesia in an OR, but but many hospitals will allow a clerical worker to handle discharge administration, even if the policy says “social workers must sign off on the home care plan”) that reduces the amount of clout any individual social worker has.

Just a thought…

But they didn’t start needing these advanced degrees.

These female dominated professions have worked hard for decades to raise their credibility (part of which was including requiring advanced degrees). I can’t think of any male dominated professions have had to.

Side note, a class of 20 would be welcome at my area elementary schools - they have 30+ kids in a 4th grade class.

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And yet we all need teachers, nurses, social workers, and many other members of professions which make our lives work. It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? I guess we should hope SOMEONE wants to do these jobs, though we refuse to pay them better.

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One would hope. Recently, AZ eliminated the need for a bachelor’s degree to begin teaching full time:

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed into law one of the nation’s most expansive school choice laws, he also approved a new law that would no longer require a bachelor’s degree for teaching in a classroom full time.

The legislation, SB 1159, allows people without a bachelor’s degree to start training to become a teacher while in college and finish that training while also finishing their degree.

The teaching students will be supervised by a full-time educator while in the classroom with students, and they can’t be fully certificated until they earn their bachelor’s degree. That is unless the candidate has a emergency substitute or emergency teacher certificate, in which case they can teach without supervision.

:woman_facepalming:

Arizona is beyond desperate for teachers, but starting teachers barely make a living wage. The system was broken when our son was in elementary school, but I can’t see how this move will improve anything.

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Actually, I learned that many teachers in China do not have a bachelor’s degree. Not necessary for teaching primary students. They seem to have considerable success in primary education nonetheless. If this Arizona program encourages more people to teach while working on their degree, that seems to be a good thing.

If Google doesn’t require its software engineers to have college degrees, nor United Airlines its pilots, then maybe some alternative certification is an appropriate path to consider that measures teaching skills and not just a bachelor’s degree. All my teachers had bachelor’s degrees. Most were terrible at teaching.

Law enforcement is a male dominated profession which a generation ago, had relatively few people (men) with Bachelor’s degrees. Cops, probation officers… these were actual career tracks coming out of HS (or after the military). I’m sure there are places in the country where that’s still the case-- but the ranks in my area are mostly college educated- and I think virtually all the management level jobs are held by college graduates.

I have a neighbor who is a cop. BA from a college nobody has ever heard of (but I checked- it is accredited). He’s on track for a promotion- said that nobody in the department without a BA has been tapped for advancement in “forever” (but he’s young, so who knows how long forever is).

I had great teachers (mostly) and come from a family of teachers so I’m not bashing the profession. But I have observed some idiosyncratic behavior on the part of teachers when it comes to increasing pay. If the goal is more money (which I support btw), then muddying the waters by ALSO supporting more paras in the building, and ALSO supporting more lenient sick time policies, and ALSO supporting a shorter school day, and ALSO trying to eliminate ancillary duties (lunch supervision, dismissal, etc. so if the teachers don’t do it, the system needs to hire more bodies to do it) seems quite counter-intuitive.

Get higher salaries. Bake that into the district budget. THEN tackle sick time, lunch duty, etc. But I’ve seen in many districts, the teachers fight for 6 or 8 things- the district concedes on two of them (which is never the cash) and life goes on. This is not a good way to use leverage re: salaries.

But I agree-- education is going to be in a sad state in a short period of time with record numbers of teachers retiring.

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Florida is allowing certain veterans to have a temporary, 5-year teaching certificate. It’s not renewable, and I think the idea is that those veterans will also be working on their bachelor’s degrees.

I don’t know all the details.

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The normal schools that trained teachers at the start of the last century as well as the end of the 19th were often 2 year schools. My mom taught on a 2 year provisional license during WWII in Nebraska due to a teacher shortage during the war, and later completed her 4 year degree to continue teaching.

I grew up in Phoenix with a not bad education, and middle-class teachers. That the pay standard was not able to be maintained is saddening. Late in life my mom returned to the schools to lead a string music program. But all music programs in her area were later cut due to charter schools taking the funding.

Only about 8% of people age 25-64 in China have bachelor’s degrees, according to https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=CHN&treshold=10&topic=EO . So China may not have sufficient supply of primary school teachers if it required a bachelor’s degree to teach primary school.

The Chinese PhD students in US universities are educational attainment outliers compared to the overall population in China.

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So here’s the thing about teaching from the spouse of a 20 year veteran teacher. For my wife, the money has really never mattered. The current teacher salary ranges in my wife’s county ($51,646-$75,670 for a bachelors depending experience up to $104,500 for those with a doctoral degree and 30 years experience) are livable wages. Over the years I have watched her build websites for her class (early on in a low income district), build a current library of 100+ hours of online tutorials, lead time intensive clubs, work 70+ hours a week (she normally works from 6am-5pm during the week and spends at a least 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday grading papers and making lesson plans) and make sacrifices that you would not believe to help her students as a high school Chemistry teacher while never complaining about that lifestyle.

What has changed is a lack of respect for what teachers do. My wife takes being a teacher as serious as actually having young peoples “lives in her hands” so it literally takes years off of her life when the parent of a struggling child accuses her of “not caring” or “not doing enough to help their child” when the child and parents have not taking advantage of the many resources that she has available to help students. I often wish she would retire or do something else, but she believes she is making a difference. But it is sometimes tough for me to watch the toll it takes.

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My parents both had successful lifelong careers as teachers in England without a bachelors degree. In the early 1960s they attended (and met at) a teacher training college, which was for high school graduates who hadn’t passed their A levels and qualified to go to university. And they weren’t limited to primary-age pupils. A degree wasn’t required for teachers until many years later.

Or perhaps, unlike in the US, the quality of secondary education in China (based on OECD’s PISA results) is sufficient to produce good teachers for its primary schools?

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I work in a public school (not as a classroom teacher) and you are 100% correct. You can add lawsuits to the mix. I understand why teachers are leaving- there is zero respect.

For the first time in over 10 years I am considering leaving education and going back to the medical field.

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If the conversation about teacher certification needs to continue, please start a new thread.

My mother was a teacher in Taiwan. She was able to pay for housing, food, clothing for 4 kids with enough money for a lot of other incidentals. Teaching jobs were very desirable because they paid well and teachers were very much respected by the general public. I still remember getting special treatments because my mom was a teacher.
When I moved to to the states, I was shocked how students talked back to the teacher in a classroom. I raised my daughters to treat their teachers with respect, even when they disagreed their teachers.
I am all for paying our teachers better because I want to have the best people to teach our kids.

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Yup! All of that. I also want the best people (and a lot more of them, or we are collectively going to be in a lot of trouble) to be nurses. And other helping positions.

The problem with thinking that everything has to turn a profit, is that it ignores the importance other kinds of gains, which may not show up on spreadsheets, but show up in our lives every day.

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