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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
Elizabeth Swan is a teacher. Her dad was a teacher. Her aunt was a teacher. “I went to school to teach during a time we were told, ‘There’s a teacher shortage. You will always have a job and be in high demand.’ And that has simply not been true,” Swan, a 27-year-old Illinois resident, told me. She is licensed to teach middle and high school history and social studies yet has been able to find only a substitute position that pays her $32,000 a year. She’s in a long-term relationship with a software engineer, and they each live with their families in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Swan’s American dream, she said, is to be “debt free, unafraid of homelessness, not fearing lack of insurance. And perhaps the dream that public education remains alive, so I can have a job.” Ideally, she would like to get married and have kids, but she feels she needs to move out on her own before that happens, which right now feels impossible. “Even the worst place is still going to be, like, $1,300 for a one-bedroom. It feels almost insane,” she said. Swan wants to be able to provide things like summer camp for her future kids and to stay solvent even if someone has a major medical issue or some other unavoidable blip.
