Teaching Degree vs. Engineering PhD: A Forum Debate

The Bargain That Was Teaching: €1,600 and a Solved Life

According to a forum user, they have been stuck in temporary contracts for years and are two months away from completing a PhD in electronic engineering. She studied teaching, passed the civil service exam, and is home by 3:30 PM. Both are around 27 years old.

This imbalance is the starting point for a recurring conviction on the forum: the career that the previous generation looked down upon actually paid for mortgages and vacations.

The prevailing theory isn't that teaching is a great deal today, but that it was during a specific window, and those born between 1975 and 1980 missed it. The analysis is based on a rough but striking figure: three years of an easy degree, one or two for the civil service exam, and then a stable position with a monthly salary regardless of the economic climate.

Three Years of Study and a Permanent Position: The Calculation That Seems Obvious Today

The most frequent comparison pits two life paths against each other. One involves five, six, or seven years of a demanding university program, plus another three or four years of precarious work until finding a job in their field. The other path involves a short diploma, a couple of exam sittings, and a fixed salary before turning thirty. With this arithmetic, those who chose engineering or economics in the nineties are beginning to see their decision as a lifelong miscalculation.

The narrative has a generational component that shouldn't be ignored. Family pressure pushed those with good grades towards "real" careers, while teaching was relegated to a second-tier option. Years later, those who trinc this advice are left with the bitter and hard-to-refute feeling of having worked harder for the same or less pay.

The Civil Service Exam Bottleneck: One Position for Every Forty Applicants

This is where the illusion cracks. In 2015, according to a forum user and after five years without exam calls in several specialties, the average ratio was one position for every 40 candidates. In the same year, a single waiter position on a job portal received 2,000 applications in one day. The argument presented is uncomfortable but logical: even with such a bottleneck, competing for a teaching position had a better ratio than competing for a hospitality contract.

Some go further and argue that the mantra "teaching leads directly to unemployment" doesn't hold up well against the data. In the nineties, indeed, there were graduates who spent years without being called from the waiting list, especially in regions where they didn't want to move. Then came the opposite cycle: in the Valencian Community, 500 positions were announced in the year 2000, and from then on, several years with many openings trinc, with waiting lists constantly calling on temporary staff.

The Windfalls of Positions and the Demographic Winter

The mechanism that disrupts any prior calculation is the sudden influx of job offers. In Andalusia, French was made mandatory in primary education, and suddenly, around 1,000 positions were created, which could be filled with the teaching diploma and a B2 French certificate as the only extra qualification. A windfall of this magnitude reshuffles hundreds of temporary staff in a matter of months and ruins any ratio statistics calculated three years earlier.

The problem is that these episodes occur every seven or eight years and depend on political decisions, not real demand. With a demographic winter reducing the school-age population year after year, the underlying trend points to fewer positions and more competition. Those who reach the end of this period with a permanent job secured will have won; those who fall short will have lost a decade pushing the door.

The Fine Print Hidden in the "Bargain" Narrative

According to a forum user, a teacher with a permanent position earns around €1,600 per month and has over three months of vacation, plus a schedule that allows them to pick up their children without paying for a babysitter. In contrast, another forum user shares their situation: as a public healthcare doctor, working full-time without on-call duties, they earn around €2,000 in twelve payments plus two half extra payments. The gap exists, but it's far from the abyss the complaint suggests.

The toll isn't zero either. Working with children requires enduring indiscipline, demanding parents, pedagogical bureaucracy, and increasingly questioned classroom authority. Some tried the path and gave up upon realizing that without a vocation, the classroom becomes a daily punishment. That's the cost no salary graph captures.

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Call it a consolation prize or simple late recognition: the diagnosis that unifies almost everything is that the person who made the right choice at eighteen wasn't the smartest, but the one who paid the least attention to others. And here's the disorienting fact: according to a forum user, the salary of a Navy captain after years of service is €2,600, barely a thousand more than that of a teacher who leaves class at 3 PM for nine months a year.