One thing that is commonly discussed on the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) grad school forum is the wisdom of getting an MA or PhD in English, given that one is primarily interested in teaching. There is also much discussion about how hard it is to find full-time community college work with an MA and how even a huge proportion of PhDs have trouble getting a tenure-track position in 4 year college and instead end up teaching community college, high school, or leaving academia entirely. A lot of people appear to view the MA (and to some extent the PhD) as a way to get into teaching without having to deal with high school students or the K-12 bureaucracy. The number of people who want to do research rather than teaching appears to me to be rather lower than I am used to in other disciplines (but there are so many biases affecting this perception that I can't vouch for its accuracy at all).
Yesterday, I mentioned to Robert that people talk a lot about this topic, but I've never seen anyone run the numbers on it to see if and under what conditions it makes financial sense to pursue an MA or PhD in English if one's goal is teaching. But surely the data exists to attempt to quantify the effect on one's lifetime earnings of getting one of these degrees. And following a line of fairly traditional microeconomic thinking, one could look at the differences in lifetime earnings of people who took their BA directly to the high school market and those who have an advanced degree and try for the higher education market; if an MA or a PhD is a losing proposition financially, you could think of that difference as the amount of money people are willing to give up (on average) to teach college students and not high school students (or to get the "prestige" of being "Doctor Somebody" or a "professor" even if it means teaching at Crapola County Community College in Crapola, North Dakota).
So we (read: mostly Robert) ran some numbers comparing different teaching outcomes following a graduate degree versus going immediately into high school teaching with a BA, which I consider the "default" career path of an English major who wants to teach.
We used the salary information for Austin ISD and Austin Community College to represent typical incomes for high school and community college/4 year college teachers respectively. Interesting to note was that the pay for English teachers at Austin CC is higher than the average salaries reported in the CHE's own research on pay for professors in 4 year colleges during 2007-2008. Austin CC instructors make 17% more as assistant professors, 9% more as associate professors, and 13% more as full professors than do 4 year college instructors at those ranks, on average. Robert suggests a couple of reasons for this: Austin CC is known to pay well relative to other community colleges, and community colleges typically use a single payscale for professors in all departments. In 4 year colleges, pay differs a lot based on the department and English professors tend to be at the lower end of this pay scale. So in our analysis, the salary numbers for college teachers is in the range of fair to generous.
***Finding 1: Getting hired by a "good" community college like Austin CC may be more lucrative for an English professor than getting hired by a typical 4 year university.
To generate the lifetime earning numbers, we made the following assumptions:
People will work (or be in grad school) for 43 years following their BA, then retire (assumes people get their BA at the standard age of 22).
The discount rate applied to the income stream to calculate the present value is 3%, a conservative estimate, and is used for all scenarios.
Masters degrees take 2 years to complete. (There are a few programs that let you do a BA/MA in five years, but we are focusing on those people who are graduating with their BA and contemplating grad school. And the number of those five year programs is small enough to ignore.)
Doctoral degrees take 8 years to complete. Doesn't this seem high? Well, it does take a long time to finish a PhD in the humanities. Data on 2000-2001 doctoral students in English says the average time to the PhD is 8.2 years.
Significantly, we assume that both MA and PhD students are funded with full tuition waivers and assistantships/stipends of $8,500 and $14,500 respectively. We could easily change these numbers to reflect higher stipends or people having to pay for their own education.
The average MA or PhD holder takes 3 years of adjuncting at the CC or 4 year college level before getting a full-time tenure track position. A study from 1995 reports that the average time on the non-tenure track before getting on tenure-track is 2.8 years. (If anything, I would expect that number to be higher now.)
Scenarios with lifetime earnings in present value:
People who go directly from their highest degree into high school teaching:
BA to H.S. - $1,450,000
MA to H.S. - $1,380,000
PhD to H.S. - $1,140,000
***Finding 2: As many K-12 teachers have noted, getting a graduate degree does not pay for itself. The small increase in annual pay does not make up for the two (or eight) years of lost earnings while working on the degree. A teacher who pursues a masters degree part-time, while teaching, will face a different cost-benefit. They will not forgo their teaching salary, but will probably have to pay for the degree (since they will not be available to earn their keep by teaching English 101 at their university).
People who go directly from their highest degree to a tenure-track CC or 4 year college position (aka The Luckiest Ducks):
MA to CC/4 year - $1,510,000
PhD to CC/4 year - $1,410,000
People who adjunct for 3 years before getting a tenure-track position (The Relatively Lucky Ducks):
MA 3 year adjunct - $1,460,000
PhD 3 year adjunct - $1,350,000
People who adjunct full-time for their entire career (The Unlucky Ducks):
MA adjunct - $1,000,000
PhD adjunct - $890,000
***Finding 3: The MA or PhD who adjuncts 3 years before landing a tenure-track job or gets a tenure-track job immediately will be better off financially than the MA or PhD who goes directly to high school teaching.
***Finding 4: However, an MA or PhD who does not get on the tenure-track but adjuncts full-time will make less money in their lifetime than their counterpart who goes to high school teaching. A full-time MA or PhD adjunct will make a lot less than if she had taken her BA directly to high school: an MA adjunct makes only 69% as much as a BA high school teacher and a PhD adjunct makes only 61% as much. And that's after going through the hell of writing a dissertation.
Whether it makes financial sense for the typical English BA to go to grad school depends on how likely they believe getting a tenure-track position with their advanced degree will be.
***Finding 5: From an economic standpoint, the typical PhD college instructor will make less than the typical BA high school teacher no matter what the chances are of getting into an average university. Even if the PhD has a 100% chance of getting a tenure-track job immediately, she gives up $38,500 over her lifetime relative to being a BA high school teacher. If she is like the average person and takes 3 years of adjuncting before getting tenure-track, she gives up $99,400 over her lifetime. A 1995 study of English PhDs found that after 10 years, 20% of college instructors are adjuncting; with an 80% chance of adjucting 3 years then tenure-track and a 20% chance of full-time adjuncting, she gives up $191,000. Of course, a person might feel that sacrificing this amount of money is worth it for the lifestyle/prestige advantage over being a high school teacher.
***Finding 6: MA college instructors will earn more than BA high school teachers if they get onto the tenure-track but will earn less if they do not. If she has a 100% chance of immediately getting a tenure-track job, she will earn $62,100 more than if she had become a BA high school teacher. But for the more realistic scenario of 80% chance of 3 years adjuncting then tenure-track and 20% chance of adjuncting the entire time, she will give up $81,200.
My take-away from this (admittedly quick and dirty) analysis:
Both the MA and a PhD are losing propositions for the typical person relative to skipping grad school and becoming a high school teacher. Getting the MA (esp. if fully funded) might make financial sense if you can get into a community college relatively quickly (or, possibly, if you can get into a well-paying "prep" school that prefers teachers with grad degrees). As for the PhD...well, I hope that you get a large stipend (say, over $30,000) or attend a particularly strong program that gets you into a much higher-than-average paying university or you really place a large value on having a PhD or teaching college students instead of high school students because the typical person pays a premium for opting out of the high school teaching career.
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