One reason people take up teaching is that although it rarely pays well, at least you have job security.
I never made big money teaching. I taught myself how to invest and for 20 years (not consecutive, though) I made more from investments than I did from salary.
That was because the college had really screwed up before I arrived, and a previous president had deducted retirement from faculty salaries and paid not a cent to their account. So they were ordered to begin a fully vested 403b retirement plan, which meant that I could move money around within it in various mutual funds
I also invested in IRAs and later Roth IRAs from the first years they were available.
One year of unemployment can destroy most of many people's savings.
I was never paid well, or even what the average private college prof makes, but I was never unemployed and I generally never bought a new anything, except for computers.
If you take away tenure, many of the smarter teachers will leave. Being smart does not necessarily make one a good teacher, but it has more positive results than being a stupid teacher.
This has always been a very anti-intellectual country. Teachers and academic credentials are not respected.
The stereotype of a genius in the US is like Emmett Brown, the inventor of the DeLorean Time machine from Back to the future: a weird-looking guy who mumbles incoherently. Or take the cast of The Big Bang Theory: a bunch of smart guys with PhD's that still believe in superheroes. Most inventors and geniuses are nothing like that. We never portray lawyers, businessmen or entrepreneurs like that.
I liked Back to the Future and the Big Bang Theory, by the way, but these things send to wrong message to the uneducated and kids who take that silliness too seriously. No one wants to be Urkle.
