It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?
I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposition towards hard work beyond the standard 9-5, an acumen for logical reasoning, ability to retain large quantities of information are all more rare than social skills and empathy, which take precedence in elementary teaching or nursing.
Our culture idolizes the hard working, career oriented person, that sacrifice other things in life to singularly chase this money and fame driven idea of success. This is irrespective of how physically/mentally healthy it is, or if it positively correlates to long term happiness.
IMO, it leads to an obsession to prove that men and women being equal, would have equal outcomes on this narrow benchmark for success. It both neglects the fact that that social norms haven't changed as much and that equal outcome is meaningless without context.
p.s: nice to see someone use 'beg the question' in the correct context.
But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.
Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major. Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great.
Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are university professors.
If anything, many university professors are grossly underpaid (for what they offer) in exchange for job security and complete freedom to pursue what they love.
Also the original quote was university teaching. The whole professorship and tenure thing is a separate giant ball of complication, and you're right that all that non-teaching stuff is extremely difficult.
Maybe, but this highlights another problem in "soft" careers (social, marketing, teaching etc). It's very hard to objectively qualify candidates. In programming, it's easy: you can program, or not. If you can, the question is likely how fast can you learn new things, and how complex programs you can design & write. Good lawyers win cases. Good traders make money. And so on... How do you compare teachers, marketers (except bullshit "increased engagement by 1600%" claims on their CVs), etc?
More people are considered qualified as elementary school teachers than those qualified for university teaching. Same with nurses and doctors.
I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia.
Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate.
University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.)
Nurse practitioner: Master's degree (undergraduate plus 2 years)
Anesthesiologist: Undergraduate + medical degree (4 years) + residency (4 years) + possible specialty training.
And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in awe of what my kids' teachers are able to do. Classroom management is a skill that is incredibly difficult to master.
If a person has a bachelor's degree, they can get a Michigan interim teaching certificate by passing a test. https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/certification/mi... Permanent certification then requires 12 hours (1 semester full-time) of courses, or working toward a masters degree would probably give an immediate and permanent bump in pay.
Imagine a random liberal arts graduate: Would it be easier to go into elementary teaching in Michigan or software development?
The teachers I know personally obtained traditional four-plus-year bachelors degrees before applying for jobs. In most cases, they had to do a year or more of subbing before finding a permanent position.
(edit to add: education degrees are very hard to get done in four years, especially with the aiding, student teaching, etc.)
I actually believe a greater percentage of the population, by far, is CAPABLE of this, but very few choose a path that gives them a self idealization that they believe they can or want to be a computer expert of any sort.
This is very much a cultural issue- the messages women receive from their media sources rarely contain reinforcement towards technical excellence.
This is a frustration for technically oriented men, I believe, because we aren't directly the source of this disparity- I think the vast majority of STEMish career men would welcome more women into the fold as true peers, but are somewhat aggravated by messages that we are somehow directly responsible for large cultural forces we have little/no power over.
Its been positive to see more girls get into sports as that message has permeated into the culture. Hopeful an equivalent message about women and STEM will percolate into the larger collective id.
It is harder to measure a cost on society inflicted by poorly educated students than it is to measure the cost of buggy, failing commercial software. Also, students who were academic failures are not necessarily guaranteed to fail in life, since there are ways to succeed in life other than by being good at school subjects, whereas an incorrect software program can never succeed.
The same holds true even inside the same field. It depends whether you are near a cash cow or a cost center. Working on infrastructure, building tooling for other developers is not likely to be rewarded as well as writing code that could cost your company millions if there is a bug.
There are also differences in specialization. An average game dev is probably going to make less than an average mobile dev, who in turn is going to make less than what a random quant makes.
FTFY
Generally only specialized teaching areas require a master's degree.
A Bachelors and a teacher training program w/ possible test is generally sufficient - and you can usually begin teaching with an interim/provisional certificate, and work on the certification as you go.
https://www.teacher.org/how-to-become/ https://www.alleducationschools.com/teacher-certification/
Not many people can play bagpipes, so supply is low. But not many people will pay to hear bagpipes, so demand is low, too. Bagpiping doesn't pay well.
Nearly everyone needs food cooked, so demand is high. But nearly everyone can cook, so supply is high, too. Cooking doesn't pay well.
Not many people can do surgery, so supply is low. Many people need surgery, so demand is high. Surgery pays well.
Supply and demand explains why surgeons make more than teachers, why basketball stars make more than nurses, and why programmers make more than janitors. It isn't about how hard something is or how noble it is. It's just supply and demand.
These market distortions affect the prices and thus the salaries in various ways. Teacher shortages show that the wage is not sensitive to the supply and demand for teachers. Do people shop around for price on needed surgeries? Do they even know the price before receiving the surgery? Do they even pay the price of the surgery? (usually paying some subsidized part of a contractually limited price).
Basketball stars show another market distortion, particularly in college basketball. The player salary is not governed by supply and demand, but by the cartel of college sports (though colleges do compete on non-salary benefits they provide...)
You could assert that these factors just inflate or reduce the supply or the demand, but it's not simply "lots of people want but few provide therefore it pays well".
Because of education level?
A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree.
If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.
As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.