High school coaching salaries are on the rise; is that a good thing?

[caption id="attachment_18200" align="alignleft" width="300"]Photo by Diana Porter Photo by Diana Porter[/caption] In September 2010, four economists — David Card, Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti and Emmanuel Saez — published a report on the effect of knowledge of peers' salaries. Put another way: how do we react when we know how much our colleagues make? The entire paper is worth your time, but the short summary: those who find out that they make more than their peers aren't affected very much, while those who find out that they make less than their peers experience a drop in job satisfaction and overall happiness. No, I don't bring this up to suggest that I need a raise (though if you're reading this, boss...), but simply to illustrate that we're always interested in how much money other people make, and rarely satisfied when we find out. Which leads us to the Houston Chronicle's recent tremendous reporting on high school coaches salaries in the Houston area. The average salary of those surveyed was $92,887, a tremendous leap from the $54,000 average back in 1995. That seems like a huge leap, right? But not so fast: as longtime DCTF contributor David Barron notes, the $54,000 in 1995, adjusted for inflation, would come out to about $85,000. So while yes, coaches salaries are increasing, they're not skyrocketing. Now comes the proverbial $64,000 question: is it a good thing that coaches are being paid more? On one hand, a reasonable person could say that someone who runs a high school sports team should not make three-and-a-half times as much as the average per capital income in Texas. Especially when public schools are facing unprecedented budget cuts. That's not an unreasonable position. On the other hand, talk to any Texas high school football coach. They'll tell you that their job is about 5 percent actually coaching football. Many of them teach, and even if they don't teach, they serve the chief motivator, life coach, psychologist, counselor, father figure and friend for dozens of young men. They shape lives across the state of Texas; it's just that they do it with a whistle around their neck. So, yes, it would be unreasonable if someone was paid $92,000 just to coach high school football. Luckily, Texas high school football coaches are far from just coaches.