And this is the reality pretty much at every rung of the ladder, in corporate america, academia, or in  government.

Besides, contracts, union arrangements, etc. have a way of deteriorating over time, so don't make a decision based on expectations that may not come to fruition.FWIW, I have an MBA in Finance, and one of my grad school professors was sufficiently impressed w/ me that he encouraged me to get my Doctorate and go into academia.  

My "real" job is in academia and I am currently located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where I just finished my Ph.D. in genetics.

Just curious to hear what everyone thinks, especially since so many of us here are the ones with acutal feet on the ground, and not our heads in Washington, buried in a book of academia

After not being able to find a job, I went running back to the safe haven of academia to learn the new up-and-coming skill of computer programming (this was before the Internet).

(According to my business advisor at the Goins group, most of the students fail to find good deals and it takes several Goins Group staff members a full time effort to find homes that qualify their own criteria.)I put in 1,501 offers over the course of two weeks, which required that I essentially play hookie from my full-time job in academia in order to submit and follow up on all of the agents who responded to my initial offers.

Often those in academia can have a bias towards more scholarly pursuits and so they may view the manager of a REIT with greater prestige than a local agent or flipper.

I am going to go out on a limb and guess you are either part of the federal bureaucracy or the world of academia?  

ROI was not worth it and it's unfortunate too many in the workforce drink the academia "higher education" kool aid...Best financial decision I ever made in life was to get started in REI!

Or three.Re: academia, adjuncting.