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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Teachers may not be universally poor but wait a few years - at least in the US.

If we're talking about teachers as a consumer group perhaps we could at least think for a moment where that group is going...

I will admit that I don't know for certain that total disposable income of all US teacher finally reach zero in N years. But if a person is thinking of getting a teacher to buy their product out of the teacher's own pocket as a sales strategy, that person should keep in mind the number of US politicians who essentially say all public servants should be fired or live on starvation wages.

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The number of politicians who essentially say all public servants should be fired or live on starvation wages is rather low as a percentage of all elected officers, particularly on the local level. It's rare that you will see a local politician come right out and say "We should not be paying teachers." This phenomenon is supported by the two related factors, in my experience: Teachers tend to be not too shabby at lobbying on this level, and the large contingent of people with children don't like the idea that their kids are being neglected.

Teachers also have one of the more powerful unions in the United States, at least in non industrial states. A lot of ire is targeted not so much at the teachers as at their union and its policies.

What? Can you expand? I'm a graduate math student looking to go into academia. :/

I can probably guess it has to do with the current political climate and the growing concern among its most vocal and recently austere adherents that union labor is bad, ergo teachers are as well.

Gird yourself, you'll hear the argument that School summer vacations equate to laziness pretty often. Just FYI.

Academia is a bit different than K-12 education, though not without its own set of issues. The main problem there is the move towards a semi-freelance "research manager" model, where technically you have a research position, which also comes with responsibilities like teaching classes and serving on committees, but also the university expects you to bring in external money to pay for at least part of your own salary, plus ideally a lab of students and post-docs. So the prof-job is really more about the management & grantwriting than about the research (the research is what the people you pay do). Math is probably a bit less far along on that transition than other areas of the sciences & engineering, though. The actual existence of the jobs (outside humanities, which is under more pressure) is probably stable for the medium-term future, though.

Math professor here. We are definitely expected (or at least encouraged) to write grants, but this is not such a big deal and most of my time is, as promised, devoted to teaching and research.

IMHO the most two important drawbacks are (1) you will make less money than in the private sector and (2) unless you are really outstanding, you will probably eventually have to move to whatever random city to happen to find a job in. A large proportion of tech jobs are in places like SF Bay Area, Austin, Seattle, Boston. The same is not true of academia.

Interesting; I'm a CS prof., where you can sometimes get away with that, but increasingly the expectation is really that you'll be funding several students out of your grant money, and at some schools, funding a portion of your salary. Baseline to get tenure at a research-oriented university seems to be about $500k-$1m of grants during the 6-year assistant position (i.e. enough to fund an average of 2 PhD students per year over that period out of non-TA/dept money).

It could be less in math because there isn't the same "lab" concept, where to be considered a "successful" professor you're supposed to oversee a lab of 3+ (better if it's 5+) PhD students, a post-doc or two, research scientists, etc.?

Yeah, thankfully this lab concept is absent, although it is always good to be advising grad students and postdocs. Most universities have tons of students who need to brush up on mediocre math backgrounds, which makes for a lot of paying work for math grad students.

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