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There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well. No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
by randyrand 4mo ago
There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well.
No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
- culopatin 4mo agoBut evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.
- jojobas 4mo agoHardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.
- bijowo1676 4mo agoso you want to leave rural children without teachers?
- SecretDreams 4mo agoI think the commenter is volunteering to go themselves.
- jojobas 4mo ago[flagged]
- bijowo1676 4mo agoI find your reference to "third worlders" a bit offensive and racist. "First worlders" (whatever that means for you) also do apply for H1B visas, just FYI. If you imply that teachers on visa are somehow inferior or worse then citizen teachers (non-existent btw since noone is volunteering for Alaska gig), you are either being terribly misinformed or just bigoted.
- throwaway85825 4mo agoWith foreign accents its often hard to understand what's being said, and harder when there's a whole class and the student doesnt want to be disruptive.
- bijowo1676 4mo agoYou are being bigoted or ignorant again. There is a whole meme of people with Indian accents, explaining things on YouTube, and Americans genuinely appreciating their lessons because American teachers with perfect English like yours have failed to explain the subject properly
- throwaway85825 4mo agoAgain? I'm not the parent commentor. I find it harder to learn if I have to decipher the words not the content. This is true for lots of different accents. This is a common experience for those not overindexing on ethnonarcissism.
- throwawaytea 4mo agoThere's also a huge group of people that instantly click away from a video as soon as they hear an indian voice. They won't show up in the comments.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoI don’t find it hard to understand foreign accents of all kinds. Why do you? It seems like a basic part of English comprehension. Obviously large companies don’t have issues with their CEOs being Indians with accents. They’re speaking to their employees, board, and the public and it’s not an issue.
- jojobas 4mo agoIndia accounts for 70% of H1B against say UK, France or Japans 1% each. Alaskan school teachers are paid below Alaskan median wage. If you support importing workforce to be fill less-than-median-paying roles you haven't thought about it very well (chances are you never will). >racist bigoted These are not magic words that somehow make your argument sound. Delegating bringing up children to underpaid workers from foreign cultures, desperate enough to consider this deal an improvement, cannot end well.
- culopatin 4mo agoIt’s a matter of incentives. The avg American grows up with certain “American dream” that clashes with that rural America life. There is no incentive to leave everything behind and go be basically alone. Immigrants have a “lower” baseline or just want the experience of being abroad, or are willing to put up with rural living because from wherever they are, it looks better. You’d have to entice a city teacher to move to rural America. You’ll say “pay them more”. But who are you taxing more? Because no one is happy when the gov starts looking at being more efficient and starts laying off some admin people either.
- jojobas 4mo agoTeachers were like 4% of all H1Bs. Using CS/AI H1B proceeds to increase pay to rural teachers more seems like a no-brainer. The current Alaskan teacher pay seems to be below median, which seems like an good threshold to disallow H1B workers altogether.
- bijowo1676 4mo agoHave you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ? H1B proceeds go to fund USCIS and its staff, they do not go towards local school districts. This whole discussion is full of racists and haters who dont know anything about the subject beyond clickbait titles
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago>Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ? That sounds sort of racist, actually.
- bijowo1676 4mo agoIt is not racist, but it is true. The Education major is one of the bottom majors, Americans with the lowest grades and lowest SAT scores go on to become public school teachers. and it is well known information among Americans themselves. https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/1954326425072546055/photo/1 https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/1954326425072546055/pho... https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report%20ADA.pdf https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-... The average SAT for Education majors: 1023 It’s ranked 24th, behind Communications (19th), Library Science (13th), and English (11th). The top major: Math. while foreigners on H1B are top percentile in academic performance and scoring and generally H1B attract top 1% talent from the global talent pool, especially given there are only like 60k visas issued per year. People who look at the stats objectively should be the first ones to advocate for more H1B teachers, if that meant children would get dramatically better education
- bluegatty 4mo agoIt's literally exactly the argument. If teachers were underpaid - it would be a poor argument. But if there's an acute shortage of 'key' workers in jobs that require education, for jobs where wages are materially above market pricing - then this is where you want H1B type programs. The idea is that it should not harm the local market for labour, and it's usually not reasonable to expect market wages to be a radical departure from where they would be otherwise. Aka - if teachers are earning $80K on average, then it's not going to work out i some small towns need to pay $150K to bring people in from the city, it also creates problems for locals. Special worker programs can be well utilized here in the right circumstances. The 'bad' scenario is when labour market is flooded where those jobs would otherwise go to locals. Tata/Infosys (generic IT workers) are alone probably 80% of the problem.
- AngryData 4mo agoThis would hold more weight if teachers in rural areas weren't getting paid less than half your thought experiment average.
- bluegatty 4mo agoYour little comment would have more weight it had any factual substance. Average teachers salary in US is 75K and it's over 100K in California. [1]https://www.nea.org/nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teacher-pay-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nea.org/nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teac...
- AngryData 4mo agoAverages can be deceiving when you have large outliers boosting it. A median would be more enlightening. Also California is one of the most expensive states in the US and the average starting pay for California teachers is 58k. And for that be the average there are people making significantly less than that which means many are making barely above the California minimum wage.
- jojobas 4mo ago
- pseudo0 4mo agoRural Alaska... Just about the most inhospitable climate in the US, remote, and with a very high cost of living. Teachers can find work just about anywhere, they have little incentive to stay in Alaska. The solution for this is simple - pay them more. There are plenty of recently graduated teachers who would work in Alaska for a few years if it paid off their student loans or let them save up a down payment on a house.
- culopatin 4mo agoAnd who pays that extra? Who are you taxing in the middle of nowhere?
- Analemma_ 4mo agoThe Alaska Permanent Fund from their oil revenue is worth $90 billion and they send every resident an annual $1,000 check on top of heavily subsidized fuel. I think they can pay competitive teacher salaries.
- Brybry 4mo agoAlaska is already in the top 8 median elementary school teacher salaries nationally, with ~$79,260 in 2025 compared to 2024 national median of $62,310 (couldn't find 2025). They were #2 and #3 in education spending as a percent of state GDP in 2024 and 2025. [1][2][3] It would need to be more than just competitive, it would probably need to be doctor-tier "I'm giving up my life plans for this salary in Alaska" level (which is what I assume it's like for foreign labor). It's possible they can afford it. I would think they would need to double or more their education spending (~$2.77 billion (24/25), ~45% -> wages) state wide which would be most of what the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out per year ($3-4 billion) [4][5] I imagine it would be politically very unpopular for obvious reasons. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kindergarten-and-elementary-school-teachers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde... [2] https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/?major_group=250000&occupation=252021&measure=13&areas=STATE https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/?major_group=250000&occupati... (increase records to see Alaska) [3] https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2024 https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2024 https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2025 https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2025 [4] https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2025/06/alaskas-schools-are-rolling-in-cash-so-why-arent-the-results-better/ https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2025/06/alaskas-schools-are-ro... [5] https://apfc.org/the-fund/fund-structure/ https://apfc.org/the-fund/fund-structure/
- janalsncm 4mo agoIs there an excess of teachers in Alaska? I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that. Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.
- throwaway85825 4mo agoThere's as many teachers in Alaska as they're willing to pay for.
- nsagent 4mo agoHaving lived in bumblefuck Alaska for a year, I can honestly say that they do in fact pay more, but it's also super expensive to live in rural Alaska. Likely a bigger issue is that very few people want to live in a town of 3000 people or less that isn't connected to the interstate road system. Money can only do so much to fix that.
- throwaway85825 4mo agoSome people live in a pressurized bubble for a month for saturation diving. If the price is right you can get someone to do almost anything.
- allarm 4mo agoIt doesn't matter how much money you have if you can't spend it.
- throwaway85825 4mo agoThat applies to a ton of people in the military. People are capable of delayed gratification.
- halestock 4mo agoEr, there is an excess of teachers because they are paid so poorly. Teaching (like nursing) is absolutely a labor of love and so they are heavily undervalued and underpaid in this country.
- esalman 4mo agoI hear this argument all the time. There's an excess of this, there's an excess of that. Seems it only comes from people who are not directly involved in hiring of such roles. We hired for an analyst role few months ago in the bay area and there was no qualified American applicants. My wife is in pavement consultancy and they hardly ever find qualified Americans for pavement design jobs.
- anon-3988 4mo agoDoes your wife's consultancy business have a growing number of clients to handle? It might also be an issue of distribution.
- esalman 4mo agoNo such issues. It's actually not a solo business, it's a civil/geological engineering consultancy firm with a mix of state/local government and private clients.
- dmix 4mo agoPeople can’t seem to separate the issue of exploitation of H1B by (mostly Indian) consultancy mills to lower wages and bypass normal immigration vs the legitimate value of specialized skilled visas. You can fix one without killing the other. It’s plausible Education might be one of the industries that gets exploited as they have no caps in the lottery like other H1 visas categories such as tech or doctors. But I don’t know enough about education visas personally.
- aprilthird2021 4mo agoYep, H1B visa abuse exists and should be clamped down on, but it's also extremely vital to our sustained economic growth and frankly our biggest growth industry: tech
- adjejmxbdjdn 4mo agoNo, it’s clear that H1Bs have destroyed the American software industry as evidenced by the fact that the American software industry saw the largest growth in wages relative to any other field in the U.S. over the past 2 decades while also seeing a massive growth in the numbers of employees over the same period, also outpacing every other industry here as well. Clearly the H1B has been devastating to American workers unlike all those other industries which haven’t seen an influx of a capped number of H1B workers every year. And that’s even before we get to how the U.S. software industry remains one of a handful of industries where the U.S. is the leader in the world and has generated trillions in wealth, and is largely responsible for the US’s continuing dominance in the world today.
- lokar 4mo agoIt’s not the job, it’s the location. There is a shortage of most careers that require and college degree in rural areas. Also, rural areas don’t have the tax base to out pay urban areas. This is about the stagnation and lack of vitality in rural towns in general.
- tastyfreeze 4mo agoRural Alaska is a special kind of rural that most people won't take to. Communities off the road where you fly in on a small plane, take a river boat, or snow machine in the winter to get there. Most are tribal and insular. Getting anyone to move there is a big ask. For a H1B teacher it is a foot in the door.
- rented_mule 4mo agoI think a lot of people don't understand how different it is to live in rural communities in general, and then to your point, how much more extreme rural Alaska is than "regular" rural areas. I live in rural California. During the pandemic, a lot of people moved here and didn't last six months before leaving (I can relate, there's a lot I miss about living in SF!). There are so many services people expect, and they expect them to be prompt. We have the opposite of economies of scale in our small town. We have zero options for meal delivery. The nearest full size grocery is a 20-30 minute drive. Costco and Trader Joe's are a 90 minute drive. There are so few auto mechanics around that many of us drive 90 minutes for car service if we don't do it ourselves. Power outages often last 3-10 days. Large snow storms (4+ feet) typically make our roads impassable for 3-7 days. When the power goes out, internet follows 90 minutes later. There's no cell coverage inside or out, even when the power is on. All of that is worse in almost all of Alaska. My brother worked on Alaska's North Slope for a few years - if you've ever seen the TV show Ice Road Truckers, that was his job. They'd fly him up north for a 1-2 week long shift, then fly him back to the little town he lived in for a week-long break. You have to worry about crazy things like hoping the summer doesn't get too warm, because roads will melt and collapse into what was previously permafrost. Uh oh, someone left a loading bay door in the warehouse open and now there's a polar bear in there breaking expensive stuff. Then you go home and can't go inside because a moose decided to go to sleep right in front of your door - better drive 50 miles and fuel up because you might be sleeping in your vehicle tonight and you don't want to freeze to death if your fuel runs out. These are all things my brother experienced. The pay was great, but he finally gave up and moved to Anchorage to drive a truck locally there.
- thisisit 4mo agoRemind me who is at the forefront of cutting funding to government programs. The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?
- zx8080 4mo ago> No good reason to import them except to pay them even less. Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.