The nation's teachers have expressed dissatisfaction with low wages, overcrowded classrooms and having to pay for students’ supplies out of their own pockets.
Now there’s one more thing for them to be unhappy about: Teachers are among the biggest borrowers of student loans, according to a survey by the social media app Fishbowl.
Fishbowl asked 10,284 teachers, management consultants, accountants, and advertising and marketing professionals if they had student loans. Teachers soared to the top with 64,73% indicating that they have student loans.
Teachers also had the lowest percentage of those who never took out student loans, 13.85%, and they also recorded the lowest percentage, 21.42%, of those who have paid back their student loans.
Management consulting professionals are the least in debt, with only 30.45% saying they have student loans. This group, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had a median pay of $83,610 in 2018.
The median salary for a high school teacher with a bachelor’s degree in 2018 was $60,320; $58,600 for a middle school teacher; and $57,980 for an elementary and kindergarten teacher. Post-secondary teachers with a master’s or Ph.D. degree collected a higher wage, with a median of $88,890 in 2018.
This isn't the first time that teachers' debt burden has come under the spotlight.
Burdened with a portion of the growing $1.5 trillion student loan debt facing the country, many teachers have turned to The Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program, enacted by Congress in 2007, to ease their debt. But in a lawsuit filed last month, eight members of the American Federation of Teachers, the national union itself, and AFT President Randi Weingarten, allege that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “deliberately stymied public service workers from accessing a loan forgiveness program they are entitled to under federal law.”
The loan forgiveness program requires a teacher to each full-time for five consecutive years at a qualifying low-income elementary or secondary school to be eligible. It has a forgiveness cap of either $17,500 or $5,000, depending on the subject area a student goes on to teach.
“Millions of public servants have relied on Public Service Loan Forgiveness in taking out student loans. But the education department, the very agency that is supposedly the champion of our nation’s education system, has failed to live up to its role in administering this program,’’ the lawsuit said.