Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.
Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.
There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a whole. Teachers are generally well-compensated.
Nursing, I don't know where to start.
Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE NOT well-paid because those workers deserve to be paid more than they are.
Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE well-paid because they are generally paid more than median wage.
As for some dry facts, median wages:
Registered Nurse $93,600
Public School Teacher $64,000
Private School Teacher $57,600
All U.S. Occupations $49,500
A ton of details that medians aren't showing.
I was just mentioning why folks may be on different sides here. We should at least be talking about the same thing.
If it's a "they deserve" conversation, that's very different than others.
(My mom is a retired CPS teacher.)
Shrug clearly teachers are paid more than the median wage. There isn't much to argue there.
Modeling wage/salary is pretty straightforward for the majority of jobs (weighted by number of people working the job). There really aren't too many surprises.
Monopoly/Oligopoly union power, licensing, labor supply, regulatory/compliance restrictions/barriers, and product/service output value are pretty much most of it?
No teacher is going to tell you they're not altruistic, and that they're in it for the money. They see themselves as doing good, and I agree that they are. But that's not what drives entrance into those fields.
No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid.
Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensation. Your subjective consideration of "well-compensated" may differ from mine and fair enough, but I find generally one's position is more an index of their political beliefs (or sentiments towards unions in general) than any objective standard of what is "surprising" ("a retirement plan? In this economy?).
The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pensions are extremely valuable, and not at all a market-rate perk in the broader economy.
It's easy to win an argument with a straw man saying "teachers are overcompensated". It'll be harder for you to contend with the argument I'm actually making.
>Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields
To which somebody else said:
Not in the US!
And no, they aren't. And they're not "valorized." If salaries are surprising ito you, and if you say that doesn't mean "teachers are overcompensated," ok!, but I'm not sure where the argument with this straw man occurred. I know what the median salaries and general entry salaries for teachers are for my city, because I work with them (though not a k-12 teacher myself), I understand the debt calculations they have to make to continue, and I do not think they are well-paid.
But I did take your advice to google it and now I would say that teachers' incomes are described as "comparatively low" or "lagging behind cost increases" or "not keeping up with the rate of inflation" because in the results I see phrases like that quite a bit. So I wouldn't say that "surprisingly well-compensated" is actually true, and that "poorly paid" is "broadly false." In one relavant case I read "the 'benefits advantage' is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers."
In a given metro, you can simply look up the median income, then look up the median teacher's income --- it'll be higher, and that's before benefits.
I think it's good we compensate teachers well. I think it's bad that people don't understand how valuable defined-benefit pensions are, because they are an enormous component of state income taxes and, especially, property taxes --- property taxes are regressive, and promote a cycle of housing exclusion in areas of opportunity. If you think a defined-benefit pension is akin to a 401K, or that a private sector employee could reasonably expect to get one, I'd suggest you maybe read up a bit.
For someone with masters-level education and years of experience?