The amount of class time per week in our county is ~30. So even if they spend 15 hours a week outside of class on those things, that's a 45 hour work week, very consistent with that of other white collar workers making that kind of money.
Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+.
Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.
so the starting salary is decent - where does it top out for our new grad accountant, and for our new teacher? Also, many teachers are not liberal arts majors; I have several teacher friends who are math/science majors with an M.Ed or whatever it is - and a couple programmer friends who are ex-teacher math majors, and the career switch was certainly influenced by the option to easily double their income.
In most places, teachers will top out at $70-80k if they stay teachers and don't move into administration, which is consistent with what that accounting grad would make in the payroll or HR department of a company. Note that at that point, the benefits become even more significant. Teachers often have healthcare plans that cover their family members, where they pay a lower portion of premiums, etc. They get large pension contributions and often get healthcare benefits in retirement, which is rare in the private sector.
Math/pure science majors aren't worth anything. There is a huge oversupply of people with say biology or chemistry degrees. In the private sector, a biology major is lucky to start at $35k/year.
Obviously you can dramatically increase your salary by acquiring programming skills and going into software development, but that's not unique to teachers. Programmers make way more than pretty much every other field you'd find yourself in after getting a non-engineering bachelors degree, except maybe economics.
rayiner, how is it consistent with the rest of what you're saying that math/science degrees are worthless?
Understand, I acknowledge you might have more knowledge/experience on this, I'm just skeptical. I would think - and the tone of your argument seems to posit - that it matters more what you decide to do with that degree than what degree you have.
Is it really worthless to have a good math degree if you become a quant? I understand market oversaturation, but that could be said of almost every degree, moreso liberal arts.
There are lots of jobs that will pay $60-$120k starting salary for people with math/science degrees, mainly finance and management consulting. But those jobs are open to very few of the huge numbers of people that graduate each year with math and pure science degrees. Those companies are looking for people with top grades from top schools.
But your typical teacher doesn't have a 3.8 at Dartmouth, and the option to go make $80k/year as an energy trader at a major power company. They've got a 3.4 at the local second-tier school. Recruiters at those jobs won't even read these peoples' resumes. Their alternatives to teaching are entry-level jobs at laboratories. The average starting salary of a biology/life sciences major nationwide in 2010 was $33k: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/11/college-degrees-best-salari.... If you throw in math and physics, which pull the averages up, the average for the math/sciences category is $42k, not that much better social sciences at $37k: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/15/college-de....
Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+.
Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.