[cherry]

teachers start out relatively low....no lower than new social workers or accountants or librarians...but their pay goes up fairly quickly....and the time off...its worth many thousands of dollars...the benefits..the retirement..and after a short 2 yrs or so, many have tenure and can't be fired....

what do education majors expect?....to be paid like they are nuclear engineers?...rock stars?...

[M. Dodge Thomas]

If my friend is any measure, high school teachers put in long hours before and after class preparing lesson plans, grading homework and the like. She spends at last 2 hours on this every weekend evening and and 5-6 hours on weekends, and says that many of her co-workers do the same. Pretty hard to stay unmotivated do this for very long for 32-35K the first few years when you are also facing an uphill battle to teach students who are often apathetic or hostile to educations, and battling two bureaucracies at the same time.

Another thing about those low starting salaries: they make it VERY difficult to attract older individuals from other carries once they have undertaken family financial responsibilities.

what do education majors expect?....to be paid like they are nuclear engineers?...

Someone who has the intelligence and educational background to be a really good high school biology, physics or chemistry instructor CAN by an engineer or industrial chemist or bio-tech researcher. If you want people of equivalent ability, you need to provide them with equivalent pay.

(BTW, present day "nuclear engineering" is regarded by much of the engineering profession as a field populated largely by second-raters, a line of work you go into if you can't handler the tough stuff.)

[rwfromkansas]

Pay doesn’t go up quickly at all unless you get a doctorate.

Even that isn’t that quickly.

Otherwise, all you get are little cost of living increases.