Originally Posted by
AuntShecky
You have to look at future hiring trends in both secondary schools and colleges.
It's possible to land a job into a high school program,if you can cut the line of all the other liberal arts majors ahead of you. As the Time article says, there is going to be preference for science and math teachers. Look at the classified ads, though, and you will see that many secondary teaching positions aren't primarily full-time. They might have a decimal number next to the listing, such as "5.0" or "3.0." That means part-time.
The other thing you have to consider is the salary. No good teacher goes into that profession for the money--that's true! But you have to consider that you have to make a living, while simultaneously paying off student loans. Even though it'[s not unheard of for a teacher in a well-off district to be earning upwards of $100,000 yearly, but this is only after he or she has attained tenure, a reward for seniority of several decades.
As far as aiming for a spot for Academia, unless you have a Ph.D., fuhgeddaboutit. Take it from me, today's Master's degree is yesterday's bachelor's degree. Again, there is an interminable number of other folks with doctorates far ahead of you in line. English departments are shrinking and rarely if ever hiring new faculty members. It's the rare college that has an opening, again part-time. The most you can hope for is to become an "adjunct professor," if you can actually find a campus in need of one. Consider yourself lucky if you can land a job as an "instructor," just a short rung up from a humble teaching assistant, with comparable salaries.
You could look for openings in remedial reading and writing courses, although those positions may very well require training or accreditation in techniques and educational theory.
I read somewhere that as a result of "dumbing down" or more likely, a result of supply and demand, some colleges aren't even requiring English composition as a pre-requisite for graduation. This would mean that a decreased enrollment in literature classes.
Seeing the bleak employment future for liberal arts grads, fewer and fewer freshmen are choosing English as their majors. They may have reached this conclusion on their own, or their parents stuck with the tuition bills are encouraging them to choose a career, such as accounting or hospital administration,with a higher R.O.I. (return on their investment.) With the supply of English majors thus shrinking, there will be a highly diminished demand for college professors of English. It's like a star inexorably in red dwarf status, burning down and out before eventually exploding, leaving behind a bottomless black hole.
Be an English teacher, by all means. Just be aware of what you might be up against. I only wish I could see this coming decades ago.
An alternative is to choose a career in which writing skills are a plus.
But fuhgeddabout newspapers.