Is a Degree in Education Worth It?
Massive debt loads for ineffective Master's degrees
Last week Matthew Kraft flagged a new report from The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) calculating the “return on investment” for different types of education credentials. As Kraft summarized it, “Majoring in education has a near ZERO return on investment for lifetime earnings.”
There are three potential policy solutions here:
Option 1: Raise teacher salaries!
On an inflation-adjusted basis, teacher salaries have been relatively stable / stagnant over time. So maybe we should raise them?
Except that this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. For one, the “averages” are skewed somewhat by the fact that the teacher workforce is less experienced than it once was. Think of this on a micro level. If a district raised its salary schedule in the same year all of its veteran, highly-paid teachers retired, then suddenly its “average” salary would fall. We’ve done this on a macro level over time, which has depressed the national average teacher salary calculation.
And two, when school districts are given more money, and even sometimes when that funding increase is specifically sold as a raise for teachers, the money still doesn’t end up in the pockets of individual teachers. Instead, schools have hired a lot more staff and state leaders have allowed pension costs to eat into the money available for base salaries.
Individual districts could try to buck these trends, but that’s not a systemic solution, so many policymakers have turned to…
Option 2: Forgive teacher loans!
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently touted the fact that the federal government forgave a teacher’s $74,000 student loan debt thanks to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. That’s… a lot of money.
Was this a good investment of public dollars? Not necessarily, at least not in terms of dollars and cents.
The FREOPP report defines return on investment as, “the increase in lifetime earnings that a student can expect when they enroll in a certain degree program, minus the costs of tuition and fees, books and supplies, and lost earnings while enrolled.” According to their calculations, a large number of teacher candidates are currently enrolled in preparation programs that have a negative payoff.
The distribution for Master’s degrees is slightly worse, and the results for associate’s degrees in education are especially bad.1
You could say this is perfectly fine, that education is a social good, and it doesn’t make sense to use “return on investment” type calculations for teacher preparation programs.
I understand that type of thinking. But if you take that approach, is there some limit when the degrees are no longer worth public subsidy? Aka, instead of trying to fix things on the back end, maybe we should try to do something on the front end. Which brings us to…
Option 3: Stop requiring teachers to get degrees that don’t pay off!
There’s no evidence that Master’s degree programs make people better teachers, on average. I’m not an expert on student loans, but our current hodgepodge of loan forgiveness programs subsidize teachers to earn master’s and doctoral degrees regardless of their cost or quality.
Let’s take two examples from from The HEA group’s data on the debt-to-earnings ratio of teacher education programs. At the private, for-profit Strayer University, students took out an average of $81,000 in loans to earn a Master’s in Educational Administration and Supervision. Four years after completing their degree, the average (employed) graduate was earning just $46,000.
In contrast, graduates who earned the same diploma from the nonprofit Western Governors University left with a debt load of just under $13,000. Four years out they were earning an average salary of $73,000.
Compared to the graduates from Strayer, the Western Governors graduates will have a much easier time paying back their loans. The federal government is indifferent to this issue; it is subsidizing the high prices charged by places like Strayer.
But one way to solve the debt-to-earnings problem would be to limit the amount of loans someone can take out. We shouldn’t allow preparation programs to saddle teacher candidates with sky-high debt burdens that they won’t be able to comfortably pay back.
This is just another reason I am skeptical of the push to make all early childhood workers earn bachelor’s degrees.