Public service and pay
Last week, Michelle Singletary, who writes a personal finance column for the Washington Post, had an article about the heavy burden of college loans. She notes that the average student graduating from law or medical school owes a total of over $90,000, and argues that this debt load makes it hard for new lawyers to choose careers in public service (average starting salary $36,000) rather than private practice (average starting salary $90,000 — and the top students can get offers in the six digits). She writes supportively of a proposal from Robert Reich to make student loans payable as a percentage of salary rather than as a fixed amount.
I have two issues with this argument. First, some student loans can be repayed under an income-contingent payback plan. But, more significantly, I think it’s terribly misleading to suggest that the main problem is the burden of student loans rather than the huge disparity between the pay in the public v. private sector.
Let’s think about a lawyer fresh out of law school. She’s 26 or 27 and idealistic. And let’s take financial aid out of the picture — say she was lucky enough to get almost all grants for financial aid, and got a great summer job that paid enough to cover the rest. She’s so idealistic that she doesn’t care that her classmates are making almost three times what she is — she’s got more than enough to pay her rent and she’s happy. (Hey, I made about $21,000 my first year out of college, and thought I was rich.) And then 3 years go by, maybe 5, and she’s starting to think about having kids. And it’s a lot harder to think about supporting 2 or 3 or 4 people on that salary than it is to support 1 on it.
And women are much more likely to take public interest jobs than men. A student study at Harvard Law found that from 1998 to 2003, 10% of women graduates and 5% of men graduates took public sector jobs (including government, nonprofit, and legal services). This is consistent with broader studies of both law students and other professsions.
What’s going on here? At least some of the women are looking for more family-friendly jobs (although public service jobs are not always family-friendly), but I doubt that’s the main driving force for most. (In fact, if you’re not planning on having kids for several years, one could argue that the most family-friendly thing to do is to take a high-stress high-paying job and sock away as much money as possible, so you can afford to hire help, stop working, or go part-time when the kids come.)
I think gender roles play out in a more subtle way — that most young women don’t expect to be supporting a family on just their income, and so don’t feel compelled to maximize their earning potential. I’m not saying young men are thinking explicitly about supporting a family — but I think men get less societal support for picking altruistic but low-paying careers. And it seems that earning lots of money is an unalloyed plus for men in the dating scene, while it’s a mixed blessing for women.
Singletary writes:
"If young people come out of school saying "Show me the money," who will teach in public schools? Who will work as social workers? Who will take lower-paying physician jobs in urban and rural hospitals? Who will legally represent the downtrodden?"
If these are tasks we value as a society, maybe we should figure out a way that people can do them without giving up on a middle class life (or marrying someone who will subsidize them).
December 7th, 2004 at 1:45 pm
As usual, you make some very interesting points about yet another important and mind-bending issue. I do a lot of work with non-profits and find that sector disproportionately populated with women as well – who work insane hours for little pay and often in very difficult conditions. Many of those women have families and are married to high-earning men, which often makes me think that we can only afford to be altruistic if we have fancy husbands with fancy jobs.
December 9th, 2004 at 1:31 pm
I really enjoyed this post; it got me thinking.
Even if women decided on the choice to maximize earnings before having kids, they’d be left in the dust later by the men who can continue to climb the corporate ladder when they have kids. I’m amazed at the perks and salary levels and bonuses that have become available to my husband when all he did was just keep showing up for work. That’s something I couldn’t do, because I chose to have three kids. At some point, the executive ladder was no longer feasible for me if I wanted to stay involved in my kids’ lives.
I know some women who successfully combine high-powered jobs with an active involvement in their kids’ lives, but they have a lot more energy than I do!
The infrastructure has developed so that it really suits traditional gender roles. You can choose the high-paying corporate ladder and be really successful, but only if you can put in long hours and travel a lot. That’s something that only works for people without kids or for people who have someone else taking primary responsibility for the kids. You can choose teaching or working at a place that has more flexible job options (I think nonprofits often do), but you get less financial reward.
I don’t think we do value the public sector work so much as a society. Watch where our money goes and you’ll know what we value: big TVs, white teeth, cell phones, granite countertops are a few examples that come to my mind.
December 11th, 2004 at 1:43 pm
Public service and pay
Happened ont to a fascinating post at Half Changed World about public service and pay. The crux of the discussion is whether people should have to sacrifice a middle-class life to do public interest work. As someone who’s student loan