“Dopey” Triumphant?

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Sara Mead objects to a post I put up Monday illustrating that a recent college graduate with an average student loan burden who became a public school teacher could afford to make his monthly loan payments, take care of his essentials, and still have a fair amount of money left over on his first‐​year salary. I wrote the post in response to something Mead’s colleague Kevin Carey seemed to be saying last Saturday on Washington Journal: that student debt is so high many graduates can’t afford to go into teaching. 


So what are Mead’s objections to what I wrote? The first is that my post featured “dopey back‐​of‐​the‐​envelope calculations.” And the second? Well, you’d think she’d go on to explain why my calculations were dopey. But she doesn’t. In fact, dopey or not, while she mainly avoids the question at hand, she also more‐​or‐​less concedes that I was right:

I’m also not sure that starting teachers are the best place to focus in thinking about this issue. When my sister started her first teaching job out of college, she made more than I or most of our liberal‐​artsy friends did in our first jobs.

Ah, to be dopey. Apparently it works like a charm!