While average salaries for K-12 teachers and university professors in South Dakota sit at an embarrassing 48th in the nation, our vo-tech instructors manage to draw an average pay that is 28th in the nation. The Chronicle of Higher Education finds that the average instructor pay at our public two-year post-secondary institutions is $56,452, only 10% less than the national average. Recall that average pay for both our university professors and our K-12 teachers is more than 20% below the national average in those fields.
| State | Instructor Pay at 2-year Institutions | 2-Year Inst. Tuition | Tuition/ Instructor Pay |
| Iowa | $58,218 | $4,812 | 8.3% |
| Minnesota | $69,396 | $5,324 | 7.7% |
| Montana | $43,530 | $3,384 | 7.8% |
| Nebraska | $53,121 | $3,002 | 5.7% |
| North Dakota | $54,405 | $4,601 | 8.5% |
| South Dakota | $56,452 | $5,787 | 10.3% |
| Wyoming | $57,389 | $2,998 | 5.2% |
| United States | $62,404 | $3,136 | 5.0% |
Regionally, South Dakota’s vo-tech instructor pay is right in the middle, ahead of Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota but behind Wyoming, Iowa, and regional champ Minnesota.
I’d like to think our relatively good vo-tech instructor pay comes from the 2016 Schoenbeck Amendment, which in its brief year of existence guaranteed that 3% of the 2016 sales tax increase would go toward increasing vo-tech instructor pay.
But notice also the great disparity in vo-tech tuition. As I noted Wednesday, South Dakota has the third-highest two-year tuition in the country. While the average two-year student’s tuition nationwide equals 5% of an instructor’s average salary, South Dakota vo-tech students are each supporting over 10% of an instructor’s pay. That’s one more indicator that South Dakota is making students foot more of the bill for their career/technical education than other states do.
Is there some reason students shouldn’t foot the bill for their own education? The rest of us will help them pay off their student loans when we engage them to perform services. Consider it a form of tuition reimbursement.
As for teacher pay, if you can get a higher paying job in another state, why don’t you? Minnesota pays better than average. Get a job in Minnesota. That will solve that problem for you. As long as plenty of people are willing to teach for low pay, the pay won’t change. One thing I noticed years ago, no matter what you do for a living, it seems there’s always somebody else willing to do it, and work harder at it, for less money. I know, that stinks, but that’s life. Nobody is indispensable.
“It seems there’s always somebody else willing to do it …” has little to do with whether they have the ability to do it. AND, if they have the ability to do it, they won’t do it for less.
Kudos to SD for paying decently! Hip, hip, hooray!
Wow, that tuition is sky high! Is SD that incredibly inefficient and larded with waste and abuse that they have to jack tuition up like that? Looks like it’s really poorly run.
Russpublicans are always talking about wanting to entice business, but they’re pricing trained labor out of an education. Maybe SDGOP is not really “business-friendly.”
Anne, did you say your opening statement to Governor Daugaard and T. Denny Sanford when they created the Build Dakota Scholarship? Just this week Tuesday, Gov. Daugaard annoucned free post-secondary education for 356 vo-tech students. Why shouldn’t they pay for their own school?
Anne’s statement that getting a job in Minnesota “will solve that problem for you” shows first of all that she hardly read the headline, let alone the actual figures in the article. In this case, teacher pay at our vo-techs doesn’t appear to be a problem, as South Dakota somehow manages to meet my definition of a competitive regional wage, paying the regional median. That feat leads to the question of why we can’t pull off a comparable feat for our K-12 teachers, but that’s not a focus of this post.
More importantly, Anne’s “if you don’t like it, leave” response also shows that she misunderstands the problem as the annoyance of people whom she’d like to dispense with instead of a public policy problem. The problem is that we are making students bear an unusually high proportion of the cost of vo-tech education. Translating Anne’s teacher pay distraction to the real problem addressed here, Anne can say to those students: “If you don’t like it, leave! Go to Minnesota for a cheaper education!” Those departing students may give Anne the personal satisfaction of getting rid of young people she perceives as lazy whiners, but Anne’s contentment will leave us with the policy problem of not enough young people staying to work in South Dakota.
So there’s the real public policy question, Anne. Do you think it’s o.k. for South Dakota to maintain a policy offering the students the worst deal in the region on vo-tech education?