A number of reasons.

1. Union contracts–school districts generally won’t hire inexperienced teachers with graduate degrees because they have to be paid at the top of the scale.

2. Teaching skills — History PhD programs don’t select for or develop good skills in the classroom.

3. The good-old-girls network. The way you get a job in high-paying desirable school districts is much like the way it worked in unionized auto plants — you have an ‘in’ with the administration which often consists of relatives already teaching there. Or you pay your dues through several years of being on the sub. Or both.

4. A PhD may make you an undesirable colleague. You’re a risk to make the other teachers look bad by being too smart and working too hard.

He said that in some colleges, sometimes, Deans can help to save a department that is spiraling downward. That’s one function they sometimes perform. Deans can veto the 3d rate scholar that the 2d rate scholars want to add to their department.

He said that the key problem deans could sometimes overcome, in the circumstance, was that “First rate scholars like to hire other first rate scholars.” The problem was that “second rate scholars like to hire third rate scholars (because emotional insecurity, he implied) and third rate scholars liked to hire fifth rate scholars.”

A question for Arnold (it seems like he skims these comments in his spare time)

QUESTION:

Are there fields where “people hire people smarter than themselves” (smarter, better, faster, tougher, sexier, whatever) and conversely, fields where decision makers are afraid to do so?

Do we have theories for this?

Why, for example, are many history Ph.D.s driving cabs (now Uber) and not teaching high school? (occupational licensing plus health care costs monotonically increasing with average age of the employee roster, maybe).

Can this have an effect? Presumably in marketing they hire people because they can increase sales. But some fields, it seems the organization has no clear objective function where you hire someone who probably is good for the bottom line–because you can’t measure an increase to the bottom line. There is no bottom line.

An odd conversation I had with my elderly mother–she pointed that symphony violinists can battle it out for the position of first chair. If the second chair thinks he/she is better, that person can try to usurp the position. Is this actually true? More generally, how many fields are like that, even remotely?

Let’s say Steve gets a promotion over Joe. It is easier for the employer to justify this based on a degree Steve has that Joe doesn’t than on experience, even if Steve’s is military experience.

I dealt with this when I was in the service. Say you had a sergeant with ten years of experience doing something. Well, obviously that means nothing, what really matters is that he grind out some online classes to get a degree in “military studies” from some “college” no one has ever heard of. Worse, this was actually required for advancement within the military, and had to be done on the soldier’s own time.

Same thing for officers. There were ways to get a “real” graduate degree as a serving officer, but the majority of them do some kind of correspondence course to get a “strategic studies” or “organizational psychology” degree or some nonsense around eight or ten years into their career and, again, this was taken into account for promotion.

For a smaller firm, they need to get as much as possible out of each employee, so spending time training someone, even if they are cheap, isn’t going to be a cost they can easily absorb.

Yeah, it’s no joke. 142 is a number I will never forget. That was the hours required to graduate where I went. That’s ~18 a semester. Almost none of my AP credits transferred, which was a good thing because the one that did, Calculus ended up screwing me because I wasn’t ready for Calculus 2. I ended up having to take 21 hours one semester. It was insane. Half the people quit to be education majors, which is kind of a shame. Maybe they should have a BA in engineering. Who knows how many took the 5 year plan. They have substantially reduced the required hours because it was just ridiculous. I’m not sure what my reward was for finishing in 4 other than a jacked up GPA.

Btw, is there really this notion of “the same job?” That seems like a very simplistic way of looking at things. Not as bad as “A BA is a BA is a BA is a BS” kind of false equivalency, but still.

Either there is a problem with the “same jobs” definition, or those employers are paying above market and therefore might also employ men at higher wages over women for the same job, which is often cited as not likely.

Of course, this supposes that they do filter out government jobs, especially federal, which do pay based on education even for the same job, e.g., GS-9 for experience, GS-10 for undergraduate, GS-11 for Masters, etc.

As a thought experiment level, it seems like military experience would be a real bonus for management. But if you are going into management, that’s a pretty high level.