Torn between becoming a HS teacher or a college professor.

I'm a prof in the biosciences.

Every decent opening has between 300 and 1000 applicants. You'll also need multiple postdocs. If at a non-reserach heavy place, you'll need a teaching postdoc and at a research-heavy place, you'll need multiple PDs and a famous advisor pushing you forward.

Salary is good. Tough job, a lot like running fast.

Then after getting the position, that's when the real competition starts.

Also, the last stats I saw were from 2015 and only 2.9% of PhD earner in STEM got into a perm academic job (tenure) and only 0.5% made full professor.

learned opinions wrote:

This is a no brainer. Higher education. Find a job in a smaller town. Live the simple life and smother yourself in your field of learning, if you want. It appears you already do that, which I think is fantastic. Having a passion for something is enviable. Get married to a skinny girl who likes to run a little and go to the market. Live in a big house that doesn't cost a lot because you live in the country. Have kids, put them through college for free where you work at. Or maybe there is a good sister school somewhere they'd rather go to that still won't cost you a lot. Don't forget, most higher education schools have great athletic facilities that you can use for free. Stay fit, live long, and raise a good family.

You won't regret it.

Ok, this sticks out as the very odd thing in your list of things to do:

"Get married to a skinny girl who likes to run a little and go to the market."

??? A skinny girl who likes to run a little and go to the market? Go to the market? What does that even mean? Maybe that has a meaning I am not aware of.

Really it depends on the subject. In the UC system full-time econ professors start at $140k. Whereas other subjects such as biology or english start at $40-$60k. Most high schools in my area pay significantly more than $50k and a full-time professorship takes a PhD so you'd be better off teaching high school. You can be a lecturer with a masters degree, but lecturers make in the range of $5k-$25k per quarter depending on how long they've been doing it.

That said, a PhD teaching high school can set you up for a Principal position. Those pay more than most college professors.

So really spend a couple years researching what the professor salary is for your field. Any public university has the salaries posted online so you can find a new professor and look at what their starting salary was. AND keep in mind the US market for full-time professors is over saturated. Getting a job takes luck. Most have to go overseas or start out at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere. Unless you go to a top 10 school (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, MIT, ..., etc.). Even then, those top 10 schools will land you at a mid range school. Most PhDs don't consider this and they are disappointed when they graduate and don't land a job at a top school. On the other hand, the private sector is viewing PhDs as more valuable. Amazon hires about 20 econ PhDs per year and pays $240k. Other firms pay even more and are looking to hire PhDs. At the job I had before I pursued my PhD, the team consisted of 42 people. Of that, 39 had PhDs. The only ones who did not had been working for the company for 25-30 years. That was why I went back for it. I figured, 5 years in school or 25 years on the job to move up through the ranks. I suppose I can't conclude anything until I retire and look back on how my life ended up. Of course I'll never know how it turned out without the PhD.

Just some things to think about. I'm not a greedy person, but money is important to me. As you can tell by my references to salaries.

GoldenMiles wrote:

tayw22 wrote:

okay, wth? to a "skinny girl?" sarcastic "thanks" for bringing back unwanted stereotypes and societal standards. are you from the 1600s bc the last time I checked, women shouldnt have to be skinny for men. women love themselves for the way they are, and most men don't even like skinny girls. everyone has different tastes. and also, most of the time, you don't get to go to college for free just bc your parents work there

Glad you caught that little nugget of grossness. LR is unfortunately a hotbed of misogyny (sometimes hidden, sometimes not). So much of it is sexual resentment to me.

Ashley Graham would be glad to hear this.

You're 20 years old? Choose the PhD in a hard science. When you are 26 and get your doctorate, you'll have a lot more options, and honestly, probably won't want to teach anymore. Don't close doors now by choosing high school education. That door will ALWAYS be open.

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

You're 20 years old? Choose the PhD in a hard science. When you are 26 and get your doctorate, you'll have a lot more options, and honestly, probably won't want to teach anymore. Don't close doors now by choosing high school education. That door will ALWAYS be open.

OP is now at least 30 years old. Please try to keep up.

In the decade since this thread was started, thousands ands thousands of newly minted PhDs have attempted to land a tenured position at a university. The vast majority have failed. There simply are not enough tenured positions at universities.

Additionally, universities are under increasing pressure to trim their bloated staffs to cut down on skyrocketing costs.

I know a science PhD who works part time as an adjunct professor and gets paid peanuts. Thank God for the trust fund.

I wrote this ten years ago now and it holds up. It also reminds me to stop spending time here. Prior to this, I had gone seven years without a tenure track job, living on a couple two year positions and adjunct work. A couple years later, we both got tenure-track jobs at a research university and I got tenure and she didn't, though we both exceeded our tenure requirements by a lot and had unanimous support in our departments. So, I got through the process but now we're back to one income and having to likely move for another job. As of 2016, 73% of positions were off the tenure track. The percentages aren't good. You have to really love what you're doing to enter into academia unless you're looking at graduate school at an Ivy or similar university, because it is very hard to get it done and much is out of your control. My salary after twenty-five years of work since entering grad school is $72k.

Higher education is one of the next bubbles to pop. Prices have outpaced inflation for years and while the net present value of a college education is still positive, there is a lot more leverage and it depends upon the choice of area to study. Nothing can go on forever.

There is a separating equilibrium where top colleges are doing well. Mediocre and even well thought of colleges are experiencing enrollment declines. To see where higher education is going, look at the recent George Washington announced shrinkage. Rather than dumb down admissions in the face of declining demand, it is taking the incredibly difficult step to reduce enrollment and maintain quality. It seems to me they are getting ahead of an issue that will effect even a top 50 liberal arts college like GW.

As a former academic, I would also not recommend you become a professor unless you are very, very smart and publishing novel research comes easy. While the victim studies fields seem to require idealogical purity, most hard fields (including economics require) real talent. I am a Ph.D., a NSF award winner and was one of the top students in my undergraduate public Ivy University (UNC) with tons of awards-I was shocked at the level of talent in my field and if I had to do it over again, there are really only 4 or 5 Ph.D. programs worth attending, not the 10th best like I attended. Law school economics apply here.

No sour grapes here either. The math and stats I learned in my degree allow me to make a very good living, one I could not earn without years of training. I got paid to leave academics.

Colleges are also becoming increasingly politically correct and if you have a real passion for making students better rather than enabling their victimhood, you will run into problems.

Add to this that despite our supposed state of white supremacy, many bright foreign nationals desire to live here and one of the few clean ways is to get an academic position. Academics is vastly oversupplied and colleges exploit it all day long as 75% of teaching is done by low paid adjuncts. For a group who bleats about income inequality, they create it better than anyone.

Become a high school teacher. The problem is getting on with a school district where parents still give a crap about their kids. Become a track coach who doesn't overtrain kids and teaches them hard lessons about winning and losing. This is a no brainer.

A decade out wrote:

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

You're 20 years old? Choose the PhD in a hard science. When you are 26 and get your doctorate, you'll have a lot more options, and honestly, probably won't want to teach anymore. Don't close doors now by choosing high school education. That door will ALWAYS be open.

OP is now at least 30 years old. Please try to keep up.

My advice still stands for others. I work with a couple PhD's in physics. They are high-level engineers in the aerospace industry now. Another PhD in physics I worked with left the company and is now some high-level consultant on the Ruby programming language. Having a PhD in a hard science allows you a lot of opportunities. Focusing on a degree geared towards teaching high school only prepares you for that narrow, crappy job.

It's why in college, I specifically chose EE. From that base, I could do analog hardware design, digital hardware design, embedded software, firmware, etc, etc. Lots of options. Or, I could go get my masters and cross into another discipline or move into engineering management. If I had focused my higher-education around being a high school physics teacher (that was something I considered), I'd be ill-prepared for anything else.

People make really dumb education decisions when they are 20 years old, and that's part of the reason you have tons of people that are saddled with student loan debt, and no good job opportunities. Always make choices to expand your opportunities, not limit them.

You're reminding me of humanities graduate classes I took a number of years ago, classes that were populated by young women mostly, who pursued graduate degrees in mental health fields. First, the ideological purity requirement was real. Students could not pass certain classes without playing the game, saying the right buzz phrases, expressing willingness to write about their societal legacy sins, etc. Second, there was much gnashing of teeth about equality, gender issues, oppression, much of it hateful and bordering on the pathological IMO. The irony that most couldn't seem to see was that this program, run by low-paid female faculty, recruited and pumped out women who graduated with much debt and were now destined to work in some of the lowest paying and least respected careers in the world. If one could design an academic program to lock women and minorities into low pay, low respect and long-term insecurity, these are the sorts of programs one might arrive at.

tlm1959 wrote:

Academics is vastly oversupplied and colleges exploit it all day long as 75% of teaching is done by low paid adjuncts. For a group who bleats about income inequality, they create it better than anyone.

inspired undergrad wrote:

I'm only two years through undergrad, so I don't know exactly what masters and Phd programs are like, but I've recently been inspired and have since been reading everything I can in my field of study. I know for sure I want to go to grad school, but I'm not sure if I want to teach high school or college....

Could some learned individuals compare and contrast the two jobs? Pros and cons?

Would love to know what the OP ended up doing.

inspired undergrad wrote:

I'm only two years through undergrad, so I don't know exactly what masters and Phd programs are like, but I've recently been inspired and have since been reading everything I can in my field of study. I know for sure I want to go to grad school, but I'm not sure if I want to teach high school or college. I realize college requires a PhD.

Nah, depends on what you’re majoring in and where you’re trying to teach.

PhD is the terminal degree for science, but you can teach with a Masters. If you want to teach at a smaller public university, small private college, or community college, a masters will suffice, but larger universities will have an expectation that you will do research or publish to further the reputation of the program. A very active contributor/editor to scientific publications with a masters is appealing as a faculty candidate in a different way than a PhD who has a very narrow field of research.

Suggest you teach high school once through undergrad to get a taste. Billions of PHD's out there working for peanuts looking to get a tenured professors position. Consider that the general public is scientifically illiterate because they don't want/need to be literate.

BigFan wrote:

Suggest you teach high school once through undergrad to get a taste. Billions of PHD's out there working for peanuts looking to get a tenured professors position. Consider that the general public is scientifically illiterate because they don't want/need to be literate.

Billions of PHDs?

Even your hyperbole is absurd.

Is the key to flexible work.

My dad works there as a home tutor and I can say he is very satisfied with his salary and his schedule...

I think working as a high school teacher is hard... I see my teachers how they are losing patience and become more nervous when it comes to working hours and hours per day.

And I don’t think they get any satisfaction from working for a minimum salary...

You can change anytime something you don t like or find not good enough for your hard work and I wish that every single professor will choose what's best for him

my opinion wrote:

as one who has a significant other teaching math at the high school level, I would suggest you teach at college.

Unless you teach in a school district where the parents care about education, you will likely get frustrated by the kids who would rather text to each other than learn anything at all.

What makes you think this is any different at the college level?

It is really difficult for PhDs to find a permanent job at the university. You say that there are not enough full-time positions in universities for all candidates and that universities are forced to reduce their staff due to financial difficulties. I sympathize with PhDs who work for little or no pay. I've been in that situation myself and I know how hard it is. However, I do not give up and hope for improvement. I believe that science is a valuable and necessary activity that will eventually be rewarded. I think that PhDs need to be flexible and creative in order to overcome difficulties and find their place in the world