Easy, short answer: whatever the market will bear.

Just offhand, I would say highest pay in education goes to the sciences and math, simply because we are losing our long-time edge in those departments and the competition with private industry is great for these people. In fact, I find our national situation downright scary. I have a young friend who is an engineer and got his grad degree at Virginia Tech. He told us that he was the only native born American in his grad class. Everybody else had come into the US from somewhere else. I also have a young relative who received his engineering degree from a very respected private American university. He’s a very smart and solid kid with a very young family. He got his dream job with a major company but was laid off after about a year — by a company which is always up on the Hill demanding more visas for foreign engineers. In my view, we have to turn this thing around, beginning with the earliest years of education.

In the third column, I would go for the languages area. Without language in a modern world which is growing ever smaller in time and distance, we can be severely handicapped by a lack of tools to communicate. One thing I learned through long overseas service is that not everybody learns English or learns it well enough to communicate accurately or feels comfortable communicating in it. Knowing their language well gains you immediate points. High on my present list are not the traditional foreign languages taught in our schools but, rather, the currently critical ones such as Chinese and Japanese. I’ll also throw in Spanish because we have too many law enforcement and government personnel who cannot communicate when they most need it on the job. That’s unfortunate because it represents a bit of a failure on the part of some Hispanic immigrants to make a very serious effort to master English. This will probably turn around with the first generation, so I see it right now as a critical stopgap measure.

In the middle column I am partial to the training sector. Without the smarts and discipline instilled by training professionals, you can enter any field with a marked disadvantage. Learning on the job in this fast-paced world is no longer what it once was. You just don’t have the time for the remedial, and the old “rabbi” or “mentor” angle can leave you adrift if that “rabbi” or “mentor” is suddenly transferred or laid off, as so often happens now at the managerial level. I have seen that happen often enough, with disastrous career ramifications. I sometimes look at it this way. You can have generals and colonels and majors and captains and lieutenants and sergeants up the wazoo; but it happens so often that the one guy who really saved your life was a mean, tough, no-nonsense; kick-your-ass repeatedly DI in boot camp.

Never having been in the first three categories in the middle column, I will leave this to those who have been there. As fars as things like History and English go, they are also important, especially in a society where education in those fields sometimes seem to have gone fishing, so to speak. One of the most frustrating parts of my own career at the managerial level was dealing with the increasing number of young people with college degrees who still did not know how to put together a coherent message using the basic techniques for not losing the attention of the reader in the first paragraph. To me teaching History or English would be a labor of love if I was ever to do it — actually, I did teach English as a foreign language for a couple of years long ago. I supposed I might be irritated if I was not paid at the same level as the math and science teachers, but I would have to realize that my skills were not as competitive as theirs in the outside world. I would also have to realize that, without the strong math and science fields, my computer used for historical research, for instance, might go bust on me every time I turned around.

Brian, I’m not sure I’m giving you exactly what you are looking for here but it’s the best I can do for you right now. The results of your poll may prove to be very interesting.

Give me a break – more in Brian’s quest to be paid more as a teacher. He’s conservative about everything but teacher pay.

Brian,

Is it true that some “retired” teachers have come back to consult, and are getting retirement, plus a new salary, and are making $200,000 or more a year?

Lawyers are typically waaaaayyyy overpaid for what they do – but we shouldn’t be surprised by that since the overwhelming majority of legislators are lawyers.