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Work in education traditionally does not pay well, particularly given the amount of training time necessary to work in it in a full-time capacity.  At the primary and secondary level, a bachelor's degree is required.  At the collegiate level, working as an instructor or lecturer, education past the bachelor's is mandated.  For professorial work, a terminal degree--usually a doctorate--is obligatory.  Each requires years to earn, and terminal degrees almost always require work beyond the classroom; for example, the PhD is a research degree, meaning that to earn it obliges a candidate to contribute to human knowledge, to learn something that nobody else on the planet has known before.

It is no small thing, yet it is relatively little rewarded.  HigherEdJobs.com reports that the average new assistant professor in the 2012-2013 academic year (who will have been in school for eleven or more years to earn a doctorate and will have worked several years outside the tenure track) earned some US$65,000.  It is a good salary in itself, but it comes at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt in most cases, and years of lost wages and benefits in nearly all; the degrees get done in a decade only through full-time enrollment, and full-time enrollment almost completely precludes full-time employment, which is where the (few remaining) benefits are to be found.  Data on the far more frequently seen adjunct faculty--part-time college teachers who constitute the majority of the academic workforce and who often themselves hold terminal degrees--are lacking, but from having been one and having been among many others, I can assert that the remuneration leaves much to be desired.  The pay comes from the classroom hours only, but the job necessarily extends outside of classroom hours; there is no other way to do it.

One of the things that was supposed to offset the relatively low economic position of the US teaching corps was the security of the job.  It may not have paid well, but those who showed up and did a decent job did not have to worry that they would not have a job to do the next term if they wanted it.  But there is a reason I cast the description in the past tense, and that reason is that it is no longer the case.  No Child Left Behind (about which is a bit here and a related bit here) does much of it at the primary and secondary level--but that is old news.  Various other applicable laws impact it at the collegiate level (about which comments are here and possibly elsewhere).  My own experience has not avoided the problem, either, as I have remarked (here, here, and here).  That many people continue to pursue teaching careers, then, is perhaps confusing.

I am sure that there are many who use teaching as a stopgap measure on the way to a "real" job; the increasingly contingent academic workforce promotes an accelerating turnover that ensures there will always be jobs coming open.  But there are many who view teaching as a career even with the difficulties attendant upon it.  They speak to the old entanglement of formalized education with religious institutions because they respond to the work of scholarship as a calling, a thing that is in them to do and demands to be done.  I am such a person, as can be guessed; even in this blog, I push out piece that at least passingly resemble scholarly discourse, and I certainly talk about enough of it.  In that spirit, I have accepted other employment in the academy, employment that does something to connect me to the professed faith of my family these past few generations.  As I have noted, I am a Methodist and come from Methodists, and it is typical of Methodist clergy (among whom have been a great-grandfather and a great uncle of mine) that they are rotated among churches, traveling from post to post from time to time.  And so I will be relocating to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to take up a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.

The position is temporary, one year renewable for up to three.  The teaching load is quite nice, particularly given the load I have been carrying these past years; I will be able to spend more time with students and more time on other work.  Early though it is, I am confident that I will be renewed, but I am not arrogantly assuming that I will be; instead, I am working to ensure that I have the option, and I am not ignoring others.  How and where I will move after remains to be seen--and I look forward to finding out.