THE PRICE OF THE DOCTORATE

How much does it cost to be a teacher? And once a teacher, how much is it worth? These questions, precise and succinct, are answered as tersely as they are asked in this month's School Life by Miss Elma B. Carr.

A bachelor's degree costs $4800 and four years, the master's $6000 and five, and the doctorate, $8500, and seven--a not inconsiderable investment--in terms and money alike. And the reward? For the few who are chosen, it is a professorship, attained only at the end of 15 or 20 years, and worth, at a small college, perhaps $3000, at a medium-sized one $3700 and at the largest $6000. The gains of a deanship are slightly higher. Whereas professors average $3111 and instructors $1588, deans in 44 institutions receive a mean of $3634.

The whole problem of recruiting the teaching profession is here stated luminously and conclusively. As a career teaching offers nothing materially speaking, commensurate with the profits which await men of similar ability in other professions On a financial basis it cannot compete with law, medicine, business, and hardly with some trades. This fact, of course, is not new, but it is worth stating in figures which cannot be blinked.

Because teaching must compete in the future, as it does not now, for the finest of university graduates, it is important to see the problem and the remedy. The rewards of education, of course, cannot all be reduced to statistics. A professor of English literature will never be paid like the president of a railroad, and no embryo professors ever expect to be. But as long as they can hope to strike no higher average than $3111 after spending $8500 and 20 years in preparation, the great majority of the best of them will continue to turn regretfully to railroads and banks and law offices and brokerage establishments.