Second MSEd, PhD and Salaries

I have been considering going back to school. I have already been designing courses for schools for years off and on as a freelance business and I feel like I would like to back up my skill set with an actual degree (my MSEd degree is in a totally unrelated area) so that I might be able to teach someday or at least work at a University instead of as a freelance if I wanted to. Anyway, I have two kids in college (actually one about to start next year) and am trying to find a program for myself to go online probably for lower cost. I found an MSEd and PhD programs at NIU for Educational Technology. I was all set to start until I read salaries for people with those degrees. I was on salary.com and payscale.com and was just surprised to see that people with those degrees do not really seem to make that much. Are those reliable sites for salary information or do you have suggestions on better? It was a little disheartening to think about doing all that extra schooling and not even increasing my salary from where it is now as a result. Just curious if anyone knew if those sites are good or if there are more reliable sites to check salary info on. Thanks.

 

I had never used salary.com before and I'm not going to give it a great review. Aside from finding it a bit clunky I thought the salaries were a bit high. That may be accounted for by the fact that despite the fact that I plugged in my zip code, it was showing jobs in NYC. So it may have been showing average salary for my neighborhood or maybe the geographical search parameters were so wide that the numbers were inaccurate for me.

 

Thanks for writing back. I was thinking the salaries were a bit low for my area (Chicago). Really gave me pause as to whether I wanted to go after a second degree for the extra cost without any expectation for increase in salary.