Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.
I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program — John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
…but at least it will be an eco-friendly toilet. It’s really infuriating that the administration continues to bail out the foolish and irresponsible with the money of the productive.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More brilliant government “investment” decisions. As he notes, these clueless idiots think that any dollar spent by the government is an “investment.”
Dana Rohrabacher makes the case. He doesn’t seem to be consistent in his terminology, though. He starts out calling them “fuel” depots, and later switches to “propellant.”