Quote from zdreg:
a tenured professomakes $20,000/ course.
That might be a bit on the low side for an associate professors, depending on discipline and region of the country. For full professors at schools with graduate programs it would be more like 30-50K/course and up, depending on the same factors. But please recognize that dividing a professors salary by the number of courses taught makes little sense in many cases.
Undergraduates often don't have a clue what their professors really do for a living. They think the only time they are working is when they are in the classroom. They don't realize that many are paying a good part, or all of their salaries via overhead. Top notch talent, training, and experience, does not come cheap.
Of course, the situation at community and junior colleges is different.
It takes a lot of money, sacrifice, and especially hard work to move from labor to capital in a single generation. Starting out at junior college, or worse yet, with an online degree, makes it even harder to do. It is much easier if you have a degree from a top notch undergraduate institution with very high admission standards. (Just attending is not enough, however.
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It's unacceptable to me that many students are, in a practical sense, relegated to labor for the rest of their lives, and likely their offspring as well, not because of their innate ability, but because they didn't have access to a good grade and secondary education. That's something we must fix, and going to charter, and private schools is not the right way to fix that problem. That's just an admission that we've given up.
(Preschool through fourth grade is the most critical element. Remedial programs are an inefficient, ineffective waste of time and money-- the goal should be to make them virtually unnecessary.)
There is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here among those who say the public schools can't be fixed. As schools get worse, and as time goes by, we end up with an increasingly greater fraction of the population being poorly educated, but still voting; still running for public office; still posting on ET. Ever so gradually, people less, and less able to make good decisions are moving into decision making positions.
