The Cost of Being a Teacher

Neil McCluskey at the Cato Institute takes issue with a comment I made on Washington Journal over the weekend, to the effect that when we force more and more college students to borrow larger and larger sums of money, we're limiting the ability of recent graduates to enter socially beneficial but relatively low-paying professions, like teaching. That's why Education Sector recently proposed a program to tie loan repayments to a percentage of person's income.

McCluskey overstates and oversimplifies what I said, characterizing my comment as "there’s no way on his salary a new teacher could comfortably afford to make his monthly debt payments." He proceeds to "refute" this notion by showing that a new teacher with an average debt load living in Indianapolis could manage to get by without declaring bankruptcy or eating Ramen noodles three meals a day. I can attest to the truth of this, since I myself moved to Indianapolis directly after grad school, and took a public sector job that paid less than what new Indy teachers make today (it was probably about the same in inflation-adjusted terms).

I didn't starve or miss any loan payments. But that's not the point. There's no single bright-line dollar amount where a loan becomes affordable or not. Every person has a unique set of resources, priorities, and concerns that add up to a decision about what field to enter. But on a macro basis, it is entirely predictable that as debt burdens rise, a larger number of new college graduates will choose not to enter relatively low-paying professions. That just Econ 101, which someone from Cato of all places should understand.

So not only is the overall pool of potential teachers reduced, but if there's any relationship between price and quality in higher education (admittedly, this is a very debatable point), we're losing a disproportionate number of students graduating with unusually high debt loads from more expensive and thus "better" colleges.

AFTBlog's Ed makes some of the same points here, while expressing surprise that we agree. C'mon, Ed, we agree on lots of things -- tax policy, most labor issues writ large. We just don't blog about them, because what's fun about that?