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The analysis is harder than that. I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or les

The analysis is harder than that. I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead. Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-masters-degree-pay-bump-for-teachers/?amp https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast... > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1] > This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
- mlyle 5y ago
  > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree. > > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries. The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money. The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields. Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.
jliptzin 5y ago
I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.
- toast0 5y ago
  Too bad it's vacation time when everyone else is having vacation, so everything is crowded.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    The saving grace is that it’s synchro with your kids’ vacations.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  It’s tricky. Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less. As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one. Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.

barry-cotter 5y ago

> I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-masters-degree-pay-bump-for-teachers/?amp https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast... > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1] > This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

mlyle 5y ago
> This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree. > > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
mattkrause 5y ago
> This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries. The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money. The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields. Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.

jliptzin 5y ago

I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.

toast0 5y ago
Too bad it's vacation time when everyone else is having vacation, so everything is crowded.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  The saving grace is that it’s synchro with your kids’ vacations.
mattkrause 5y ago
It’s tricky. Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less. As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one. Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.