Teacher’s income paints a dismal picture
Imagine after years of grueling studies, one makes it to his or her dream career ‘teaching’. The happy bubble bursts with the realization that the pay is a lot less than the friends who took up other professions. And that’s when a teacher starts having second thoughts and others around learn from her mistakes and pursue other careers.
So what happens when a talented person with degrees is paid less? He or she a) resorts to other means of income or b) opts for a career change.
Higher GDP means more job opportunities
GDP is on the rise and most countries are economically booming. But what we don’t realise is that with a booming economy and better salaries, teaching as a career does not appeal to most.
So if in US college grads are not taking up a career in education, the same fate can be expected in India too as the GDP is growing and there are other well-paying career avenues.
Why should we be bothered?
Since education is the background of any country and makes more difference to a nation’s progress than we can imagine, what can be said for any nation where teaching is not the number one priority even for teachers? Not only that even those who made the mistake of pursuing their dream career as a teacher leave for greener pastures when they find that their hours of toil are not getting them anywhere.
Why don’t schools pay more?
The popular opinion of people who are not so wise about these things is ‘why don’t schools collect more fees so that they can pay their teachers well?’ This is rendered impossible by government’s directive which says that a school hike only a percentage of
the total fees. If it is a new school with a high fee structure then the cap will not affect the teacher’s salary. If it is a 20 years plus school then it will have an existing fee structure which even hiked by a percentage every year will not be able to do justice to the pay educators get. This is basically the reason why new schools have better teachers and old schools end up with “Talent Exodus”!
Conclusion: Better GDP leads to poor quality of education
Indian surveys indicate that the top students would like to take up teaching provided the pay is raised substantially. Finally we come to our topic- how does the improvement in GDP reduce the quality of education? If the economy is doing well, well-paying jobs will be more in number and we can expect most top grads to take these up. So, what about the educator jobs then which try as much as
we can cannot compare with the pay doled out by other professions?
We are back to where we began. Less pay, incompetent employees and the education system takes a major hit. And who suffers the loss if education quality is dismal?- Of course the country!