The Financial Calamity That Is the American Teaching Profession

Teachers are suing the government over debt relief that never came—but their financial problems go much deeper than student loans.

America needs teachers: A majority of the country’s most experienced K–12 educators are expected to retire in the next few years, while research suggests that thousands of others will likely leave the profession prematurely, citing job dissatisfaction. How to get more people to join the profession? A little more than a decade ago, policy makers came up with one idea they thought would help: Give teachers some extra support in paying off their student loans. So, in 2007, Congress tasked the U.S. Department of Education, which administers federal financial aid, with offering student-debt relief to recent graduates in public-service careers: Essentially, make your minimum monthly payments for 10 years and your loans will be erased.

Thousands of public-service workers—including teachers, nurses, and firefighters—have applied for forgiveness since 2017, when the relief went into effect, to no avail. Just 1 percent of applicants who say they meet the program’s ostensibly basic criteria have actually been approved, according to federal data, with the rest blaming misleading bureaucratic requirements that enable the Education Department’s contracted loan servicers to deny them the benefits. Now, teachers across the United States are suing the Education Department, alleging that its failure to make good on the loan forgiveness violates both their constitutional right to due process and administrative-procedure laws. (Liz Hill, the Education Department’s press secretary, declined to comment on the suit because it’s pending litigation, but noted in an email that the agency “is faithfully administering the complex program Congress passed.”)

The complaint—which was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., late last week by the American Federation of Teachers and a handful of individual public-school educators—is a capstone to the financial exasperation that, some advocates argue, has plagued K–12 teachers for more than a decade. They had counted on that loan forgiveness, they say, and planned their lives around it; its failure to materialize, the complaint’s supports allege, falls on households whose finances are already strained. Teaching, the complaint implies, is a financially calamitous path, and without loan forgiveness, teachers’ families face a lifetime of hardship.

Teachers have never been particularly well paid, but in recent decades their financial situation has gotten remarkably worse, mostly for two major reasons. The first is that pay has not grown, concludes a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, which finds that relative teacher wages “have been eroding for over half a century.” When adjusted for inflation, teachers’ average weekly pay has decreased by $21 from 1996 to 2018, according to the report, while that for other college graduates rose by $323. Data from the 2016-17 school year, the most recent for which federal statistics are available, show that K–12 teachers on average earned about $58,000 a year. In states such as Oklahoma and West Virginia—whose teaching forces each staged massive, high-profile strikes last year—the average pay is less than $46,000. In many places, educators are earning less in real terms than they did in 2009.

And the second pressure is the costs: In those same years that teacher pay has stagnated, common costs for a teacher’s household—housing, child care, higher education—have gotten much more expensive. That’s especially true in certain metro areas—San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle—where housing costs have exploded. Though these places see their real-estate markets driven by entrepreneurs, tech workers, bankers, and so on, they still need teachers, of course. In some of these places, officials have considered establishing affordable-housing communities that would be earmarked for teachers. On top of this, it’s become more common in the years since the recession for teachers to spend their own money on school supplies: Almost all public-school educators these days report shelling out personal cash for classroom products, allocating close to $500 a year on average, according to federal data.

Obviously, this financial picture becomes all the tighter when someone is also paying down student loans. Most bachelor’s-degree graduates—65 percent—have student debt, the average amount surpassing $28,000, according to the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit that seeks to make higher education more affordable and available for Americans. But as of the 2015-16 school year, a little more than half of all K–12 educators also had postbaccalaureate qualifications like master’s degrees, which means they carry even more debt. A 2014 study found that people who’d earned a master’s in education had an average debt amount of roughly $51,000. (Those with an MBA, on the other hand, graduated with $42,000 in debt, on average.) For K–12 educators with a master’s degree, the average student-debt amount more than doubled between 2000 and 2012, according to one Education Next analysis.

The fiscal burden of debt, moreover, is compounded by what the Education Next analysis describes as “a patchwork of overlapping programs, contradictory regulations, and expensive subsidies” pertaining to the loan programs and policies—in other words, the stress and time of just dealing with the debt.

Given these financial pressures, many teachers struggle to save for retirement, a situation made all the more difficult by the retirement options teachers are offered, says Andrew Katz-Moses, a financial coach in Washington, D.C., who previously taught eighth-grade math in the city’s school district. Having gone into teaching immediately upon graduating from college, Katz-Moses says that he himself struggled to navigate the confusing hodgepodge of retirement-plan options offered via third-party vendors contracted by the D.C. school district, and ended up selecting a vendor that charged him a sizable percentage of his income in “hidden fees”; those charges, he discovered, amounted to 20 or even 30 times those offered by the lower-cost alternatives.

Absent clarity from the district on the pros and cons of each vendor’s plan, minus brief informational sessions during open-enrollment season, Katz-Moses started hosting informal get-togethers where he and his colleagues could exchange advice not only on retirement plans but also on financial planning in general. Before long, hordes of his district colleagues were participating in his ad hoc sessions, most of them teachers he hadn’t even met. “That’s when I was like, Okay, there’s a real need for this,” Katz-Moses told me—this being better financial support for teachers’ future, present, and past. “I started seeing how much of a burden student loans are for teachers, and how much confusion and worry there is among instructors when it comes to public-service loan forgiveness, because these are not small differences in how people are approaching their decisions.”

Among teachers, these burdens fall more heavily on those who carry more debt, and whose families, including their spouses, are less wealthy. Black teachers, for example, tend to shoulder significantly greater student debt than do their white counterparts—a disparity that a recent Center for American Progress report suggests could in part explain why eight in 10 classroom teachers are white.

The unpredictability “is totally discouraging,” Katz-Moses says. “I see so many teachers completely overwhelmed by all the pressures.” Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that so many public-school teachers—close to one in five of them, according to 2016 data—take up part-time jobs, often moonlighting as, say, Uber drivers or Airbnb hosts: A K–12 educator is, Vox has reported, about five times more likely than the average full-time worker to also have a part-time job.

The lawsuit may help teachers get the loan relief they were counting on, but the big financial picture for teachers will remain a rough one. Following the wave of teachers’ strikes around the country that hit last year, some policy makers have sought to rectify the hardship. The Democratic senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, for example, wants to raise the average teacher’s salary by $13,500, while Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, also Democrats running for president, have advocated for giving teachers’ unions more negotiating power and matching state-level salary increases with federal dollars, respectively. Barring those bigger changes, the financial difficulties will continue.

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Chinese overseas students now looking beyond the USA

Rival education powerhouses such as Britain, Australia and Canada are the biggest beneficiaries

Caught in the crossfire of the US-China trade war, Chinese students are looking for alternative study destinations -- threatening to turn off an important source of revenue for American universities.

China accounts for nearly a third of foreign students on US campuses who pour billions of dollars into the economy, but in March their numbers dropped for the first time in a decade.

Visa delays, concerns over being shut out of research projects and safety fears have turned off Chinese students, according to several admissions consultancies and nearly a dozen parents and students interviewed by AFP.

Rival education powerhouses such as Britain, Australia and Canada are the biggest beneficiaries, a survey by New Oriental China's biggest private education provider said.

Japan and South Korea -- traditional study abroad destinations for the Chinese elite -- and parts of Europe, especially Germany and Scandinavian countries with strong engineering programmes, have also seen an uptick in applications, the survey found.

The chilling effect started mid-last year, after President Donald Trump's administration slashed the visa duration of students in science and technology fields from five years to one in some cases.

"Now there's a lot of uncertainty on whether they can even finish their studies," said Gu Huini, founder of boutique college consultancy Zoom In. Over one third of the roughly 360,000 Chinese students in the US study in "STEM fields" -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- according to the Institute of International Education in New York.

But the number of Chinese students in the US dipped by two percent in March compared to the previous year, the first drop since 2009, data from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows.

Melissa Zhang, a high school senior in Beijing, said she has abandoned plans to go to the US and was instead taking German lessons, in the hope of getting into a robotics programme in Dresden.

"I've already wasted a year preparing for my SATs," the 17-year-old said, referring to the standardised test needed to enter a US university.

"But what's the point in going to the US if I might be shut out of a research lab, just because I am Chinese." Her mother, Mingyue, said "the American dream is losing its shine" to many Chinese students.

"If America makes them feel unwelcome, they'll go elsewhere... this generation feels the whole world is open to them."

Chinese students contributed $13 billion to the US economy last year, a figure that includes tuition fees and living expenses, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Top US universities including Yale and Stanford have complained that the trade war has affected campus recruitment.

Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an open letter on June 25 that students and faculty felt "unfairly scrutinised, stigmatised and on edge -- because of their Chinese ethnicity alone".

The State Department has said the increased scrutiny was prompted by a rising number of students who were co-opted by foreign intelligence while in the United States.

Eric Wang, 25, a doctoral student at Purdue university in Indiana, said he was nervous about having to renew his visa every year.

"It's difficult to plan long-term research projects or even think about going steady with your girlfriend," said Wang.

Trump attempted to allay Chinese students' fears after reaching a trade war truce with President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit last week, saying they would be treated "just like anybody else".

He also proposed a "smart person's waiver" that would make it easier for the brightest minds to get a Green Card allowing permanent residency.

A Chinese government travel warning last month citing "gun violence and robberies" in the US has also given Chinese high school students and parents cold feet.

"State media have been pumping up reports about crime in the US and families, especially from smaller Chinese cities, feel America isn't safe," said Li Shaowen, who organises foreign college tours.

"We have over 250 families visiting universities in Europe and the UK during this summer break, while only 75 families are going to the US," he said. "The numbers were reverse last year." Chinese students and parents start hunting for prospective colleges two to three years before application deadlines.

"The pipeline is drying up," said Dorothy Mae, an independent college consultant in Beijing. "US universities will see fewer students from China for several years."

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Once they got a degree, disadvantaged and advantaged Australian students did roughy equally as well -- after a slow start

The report below uses what must be the latest euphemism for "disadvantaged"  -- "Equity".  So if you start out unequal, you are an "equity" person! The logic quite escapes me despite my many years of dealing with political correctness.  But you need to know that to understand the report below.

They find that most people from an unpromising background (Aborigines and the disabled excepted) do roughly as well in jobs and income after they have graduated.  But that is only true if you look at the groups around seven years after graduation.  The "equity" students do catch up to the others but not initially.

The authors appear to think that the roughly equal long term outcomes for advantaged and disadvantaged students show that a university education is effective in overcoming inital disadvantages that people suffer. 

But it doesn't.  It simply shows that the selection criteria used to govern entry to university do a good job. You get into university on ability, regardless of your "equity" status.  Putting it another way, the "equity" students who get into university are a specially selected subset of the "equity" population, so how well they do does not reflect the prospects  "equity" people in general


Beyond graduation: long-term socioeconomic outcomes amongst equity students

Wojtek Tomaszewski et al.

Executive Summary

This report aimed to address significant gaps in scientific knowledge about the trajectories of post-graduation outcomes of students from equity groups by examining the following research questions:

Do equity graduates reap the benefits of university education to the same extent as non-equity graduates over the short and long run?

What are the differences in outcomes between graduates from different equity groups?

What are the specific outcome domains (e.g. labour market, social capital, wellbeing) where equity group graduates perform particularly well or particularly poorly?

To answer these research questions, the study utilised robust statistical methodologies to analyse high-quality, nationally representative longitudinal data from the ABS Census of Population and Housing (the Census) and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Both sets of analyses covered five population-based equity groups:

* low socioeconomic status (low SES)
* non-English-speaking background (NESB)
* residents in regional/remote areas
* Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Indigenous)
* students with disability.

Analysis of the Census data focused on the labour market outcomes and provided robust evidence over a short to medium time period. The Census analyses were complemented by innovative analysis of the HILDA Survey, which enabled us to document long-term trajectories across a broader set of socioeconomic outcomes (for example, health, subjective wellbeing and social capital) that go beyond the standard labour market indicators investigated by previous studies in this area.

The analysis of the longitudinal Census data suggested that there exist relatively small but significant differences between graduates from some of the equity groups and their non-equity counterparts in relation to certain labour market outcomes.

Key findings from these analyses included:

a lower likelihood of low SES and NESB graduates to be in employment, to be employed in a managerial or professional occupation, and to have a high personal income if in full-time employment

a lower likelihood of graduates with disability to be employed.
These findings are consistent with the previous evidence from the limited body of other Australian studies in this area, while arguably offering more robust evidence being based on a high-quality and authoritative data source. Furthermore, while the Census analyses have a relatively short time horizon, covering up to five years post-graduation, this analysis went considerably beyond the four- to six-month after graduation horizon of the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS), which has been typically used to report employment outcomes for university graduates in Australia.

The HILDA analyses further extended the time horizon covered, capturing outcomes up to 15 years post-graduation. They also focused on a different set of outcomes, covering health and wellbeing indicators, as well as a set of subjective measures related to employment and financial circumstances. This makes it the first study in Australia to investigate such outcomes in relation to post-university outcomes of equity graduates.

Overall, the HILDA analyses suggested that for most of the outcomes investigated in this report, the trajectories of equity and non-equity graduates moved in similar directions, and at a comparable pace, after the attainment of undergraduate university qualifications. This resulted in lack of differences or a convergence in outcomes over a longer time horizon. However, while rarely statistically significant, there appeared to be some evidence that equity graduates generally reported inferior outcomes compared with non-equity graduates, at least in the first few years after graduation. This pattern appeared to be most pronounced for indicators related to subjective assessment of financial prosperity and job security but also social support.

Although the differences between equity and non-equity graduates were often not statistically significant, or converged over time, there were two notable exceptions to this pattern: students of an Indigenous background, and students with disability, both of which reported significantly inferior outcomes compared with their non-equity counterparts, particularly in terms of physical and mental health, and subjective wellbeing as captured by life satisfaction. While based on small samples, and arguably reflecting a broader underlying disadvantage for these two equity groups, these findings highlight that this kind of disadvantage is not easily alleviated through the completion of a university degree alone, but also requires a concerted policy effort within and beyond the higher education sector. For the other equity groups, the trajectories of equity and non-equity graduates appeared to converge over a longer-run so that any initial differences disappear after seven to eight years post-graduation. However, arguably more could be done to prevent this seven- or eight-year-long catch up and give an equal start to all university graduates, regardless of their background.

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