Many of the teachers at my high school (it was an Ursuline school, and we had noth layteachers and nuns) had PhDs, and they were some of the most dynamic, intelligent, thoughtful people I have ever met. I know that at least the convent attached to my school also paid for any graduate degrees the nuns wished to pursue, and the Ursulines are a teaching order to begin with.
When I was a TA, I had a rather brilliant student who was going on to earn an MA in Spanish, and was seriously considering continuing on to her PhD, and she had every intention to teach high school. Her advisors and counsellors told her she was nuts, and shouldn’t ‘waste’ it on high school – her response was that was that she had had a PhD high school Spanish teacher, and it inspired her to give something back to her own school, and she wanted to teach at that level.
It’s not sad or an insult or a waste for a PhD to be teaching high school; there may be many reasons why that person has chosen not to try to become a university professor (or whatever). I’ve had people assume I must be stupid because I didn’t ‘make it’ as a professor – the job market for my field, medieval history, is tight, and I’ve never managed to land a university position – not because I’m daft or no good, but because the competition is tremendous.
Quite a few of the teachers in my highschool had Ph.ds. However, I did go to high school in an extremely wealthy community where the tenured teachers made (back then, don’t know what they get now) something like 60-70K teaching at the highschool level. I was under the impression that was a pretty good salary and career. They never struck me as sad sacks…my latin teacher remains one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. The only teacher I’ve had that was better than him I encountered in law school although the Middle Eastern politics prof at McGill came pretty close.
My girlfriend is getting her PhD is physics and plans to teach high school. She could teach and research at the college level, but she loves teaching. She might be along to elaborate.
There’ll be differences between countries with this one…but anybody who makes it as far as a deputy headteacher of a large school in England will be spending very little time in a classroom. They’re entirely directed towards admin, curriculum issues, finance, and everything else that’s been thrown their way.
It’s hard to see a question here under the wild elitism of this post. I’m guessing you’re very young and I’m paraphrasing your question in my mind: how might a Ph.D. in English, say, end up teaching high school? The answer is pretty simple - assuming all Ph.D.'s want to become professors (a stretch), they’re still graduating about twice as many English Ph.D.'s a year as they are hiring professors. It’s pretty natural for them to look next to secondary schools. And really - are college students all that more interesting to teach than high school students?
Why someone would pick teaching vs industry is pretty obvious. Industry gives you crappy benefits, crappy hours and crappy vacation time, and is boring, etc. And you have to figure that a person who’s spent 10 years studying literature loves it and wants to keep studying and teaching it.
Here is some academic research on ths subject re Humanities Phd’s:
----QUOTE---------------
While 80 percent of the English PhDs surveyed wanted to become professors at the end of their doctoral education, only 53 percent were tenured by 1995, the study found. Another 6 percent were in tenure-track positions and 16 percent were still in untenured, year-to-year positions as instructors. More than 10 percent were employed in business, government and nonprofit jobs. Less than 1 percent were involuntarily unemployed.
However, despite the less-than-perfect job placement rate, more than 90 percent of the English PhDs in the study felt their doctoral education was worth the effort and would do it again, Nerad reported.
The answer can be money. I have an engineering PhD, 26 publications, three years of post-doc experience as a technician. I have two kids and student loan debt. I love research, but hate the idea of working myself to death fighting for grants. I also make $40k a year. I also get roughly two months of vacation time a year (work at a university).
My wife has a MA and teaches HS. Once she tenures she will be making more money than me.
I had several teachers in high school with PhDs. They were certainly able to get “real jobs.” They had real jobs, teaching high school, and doing a great job of it.
Most of them were Jesuit priests or scholastics. The primary mission of the Jesuit order is education. The order assiged priests to its schools all over the world. None of my teachers thought they were doing something less than a “real job.”
One of the (two) Ph.Ds who taught at my high school was war buddies with my friend’s grandfather, taught his parents at college, and taught him in high school. He retired after last year; he’s really old.
I said the earth science teacher was a sad example because he wanted to teach chemistry but our school somehow would not let him. Plus I wish he would of pursued a different field, because while he might of loved the rewards of being a teacher, he was horrible at the art of teaching. I felt sorry for him all year long, and still do, so that is why his example was the saddest. You guys can’t dispute me on this unless you spent time in his classroom.
I’m sorry about using the term “real job” when I meant to say a job better than these teachers have or at least a job that they would actually want to have.
When I posted the topic I admit that I did not know that people wished to spend so much time and money for a PhD so they can just teach in high school. Its interesting that some people do. Maybe it is just me, but I only know of only one high school teacher that taught me anything that I would have considered worthwhile at the time (my physics and AP physics teacher). I thought they only valuable education possible was at the college level.
In my question I really meant to ask how people can end up teaching in high school when they don’t want too. From my small sample poll, I thought the majority of high school teachers with a PhD would not want to be in high school. I was wrong.
Can we now discuss how people with a PhD don’t get into their desired field?
It’s easy for a well-educated person with little ambition to drift into teaching. There’s rarely a lack of demand for new teaching trainees, and the initial financial position for a teacher is often far preferable to, say, the bottom rung in the chemicals industry. However, once there, it’s hard to get out - they lose touch with their initial interests, and they end up with the same financial and personal ties that make it difficult to make a change once again to get away from that career path.
Embarrassment, to be doing what you want to? Sad? Why?
I spent 3 years in a graduate program (almost got a PhD, ended up with and MS) and every time I said I wanted to work in industry, not academia, professors would stare, decide I could not possibly have said what they thought they had heard, and go on with the advice about how to go into academia.
Every 3 months or so, C&EN (a weekly published by the American Chemical Society) whines about all these poor women with PhDs who are “wasting away in 4-year colleges” instead of being in a “big college” where they’d spend 7 years on probation working on funding rather than teaching.
I would never have become an engineer if it hadn’t been for one chemist who decided he’d rather teach high school than be a lab tech and one engineer who did a substitution for a physics teacher and decided to stay (this second one also had his own practice). The history teacher we all loved was a lawyer who loved to teach history (again, teaching was a part time thing for this one).
There is nothing wrong or embarrassing about doing what you want. What should be considered embarrasing is to do something because other people expect you to.
By this, I assume you mean PhDs working outside of their field of expertise in any capacity. I suspect that this is not that common, as suggested by the post by jimmmy on humanities PhDs. But when it’s true, economics is probably the main reason … either the desired jobs aren’t there or there are hungry mouths to feed. Another reason is that people’s interest can change after working in their field for a while. Just look at the many politicians (like Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich) who have doctorates.
Why dispute it? It’s just an anecdote. Anecdotally, I had some phenomenal teachers whose lives anyone would envy. I also new plenty of miserable messed up college professors. Again, anecdotally, one of my college classmates - who was brilliant in his field - was discouraged from going into academia by a top professor this way: “why would you want to join this parade of assholes?”
It’s just you. Or let’s put it this way - that statement says more about you than high school teachers.
I believe 95% of my earlier post and every other post here has more than answered that question.
I have a PhD. in children’s literature. I teach elementary school full time and evening classes at the university. I chose to stay at the elementary level because I enjoy the little kids more than young adults.
In my suburban school districts there are teachers at every level with PhD’s or D.Ed’s – my daughters kindergarten teacher had his doctorate.
It isn’t the money. A teacher with a doctorate earns only $1,000/yr more than a teacher with a Master’s degree and advanced study, not even enough to earn back the cost of the final degree.
My experience with the teachers with D. Ed.'s tend to be the ones who work with experimental curricula, mentoring other teachers, and other behind the scenes work. The teachers with Ph.D’s tend to be department heads (not an administrative position in my school district) who look at, for example, which textbook to order for a specific course, what new advancements in the subject need to be incorporated into the curriculum, etc. In short, they get to use their advanced degrees and expertise in those areas while still teaching classroom work.
Mrs. Kunilou has Master’s degrees in two different areas. Over the years she’s been a lead teacher on a team, a mentor, supervisor for student teachers and the school “specialist” in certain areas.
Um. I have a PhD. Pathobiology, concentrating in tumor immunology. If I were a high school teacher, my salary would be MUCH higher. And I’m about the hightest paid PhD of my seniority and age.
I’m not dissing on teachers, as my ENTIRE family works in education. But, scientists are WAY more underpaid than teachers.
4 years to get BS, then you generally do a few years as a technician before spending nearly 8 years to get a PhD. Then, you have to postdoc for an additional 8-10 years (at about 40 K per year) before you have a chance of an assistant professor position. For every asst. prof position that comes available, literally hundreds of resumes arrive. The chance of getting on the tenure track is virtually nil.
I got lucky, and started my PhD right after undergrad, finished in six years and got the hell out of the ivory tower for the land of biotechnology, but had I not been so fortunate, I would have very seriously considered teaching high school so that I could make a living.
