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Originally Posted by AGDee
When I'm talking about "similar degrees", I'm referring to master's degrees, primarily. An MBA and a Masters in Ed? Definitely not even close in pay. And most professions don't require that you go to grad school after you've started your job but it's a requirement to keep your certification for teachers here.
Funding here is strictly based on the number of students and a formula based on what a district was getting in 1994 when the method of paying for education was changed drastically. So some districts receive $11-12K per student while others are receiving $5K per student. It's quite skewed.
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Here I think there's a base from the state that's the same per kid in a particular course, there's a local supplement based on property taxes, then there are equalization grants that should provide additional money to poorer districts, but since they kind of follow the poorer kids, can end up going to the bigger and not particularly poor districts who have a lot of poor students, even if the poor students aren't a big percentage of the overall enrollment.
It still doesn't seem to affect achievement that much.
As far as degrees, I don't think it makes much sense to claim that an MBA has historically been the equivalent of a MEd. It may be the case now that so many colleges offer MBAs because BAs mean so little that the MBA is pretty dumbed down too. I think even looking at the average GPA and GRE or GMAT percentiles (or whatever the MBA people take) for admissions would reveal that, even now, it's typically harder to even enter to the program for the MBA.
If something is relatively hard to do or scare and it has value to employers, then I think you could typically get more money for it. To me that makes sense just on a supply and demand level.
When you require every teacher to get a masters, and they aren't particularly hard to get, and studies show that they don't do much for student achievement, and they don't have too much value to the outside labor market, then I think it's hard to expect them to drive up salaries that much relative to other professions.
But I think you are on to something with the MBA because I think business schools are setting up the same problem. If the market has a ton of undergraduate BAs in business, then people want MBAs to offer a credential that sets them apart and makes them more valuable. When every institution of higher learning offers a fast track, part time MBA, and the numbers of people with MBAs gets inflated, they may end up having as little relatively value in employment as the undergraduate BA and eventually the MEd.