> a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology

Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major. Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great.

Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are university professors.

If anything, many university professors are grossly underpaid (for what they offer) in exchange for job security and complete freedom to pursue what they love.

There is a relative recent (<10 years) government study in Sweden that looked at gender segregation of the teaching profession, and one suggestion they made to make the profession more gender equal and bring more men into the profession was to focus the program to include more academic studies.

> so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder

Maybe, but this highlights another problem in "soft" careers (social, marketing, teaching etc). It's very hard to objectively qualify candidates. In programming, it's easy: you can program, or not. If you can, the question is likely how fast can you learn new things, and how complex programs you can design & write. Good lawyers win cases. Good traders make money. And so on... How do you compare teachers, marketers (except bullshit "increased engagement by 1600%" claims on their CVs), etc?