Sasan here, I considered recording my own addendum to this video but I’ll keep it brief and add it here. (Edit: I’m notoriously bad at keeping things brief) I think there’s a lot of interesting things to be said about the debate job market in general. The main thing that I want to echo from what Paul said is that, in nearly all instances, your debate “working career” is either going to having some other main job and debate as a small part of it, or it’s going to be something entrepreneurial where a ton of your work is going to revolve around things like marketing and managing finances. There are edge cases where someone will just give you a full time salary and all they ask in return is that you teach debate, and if you’re feeling wildly irresponsible and lucky, then I can’t in good conscience discourage you because it somehow worked out for me. I think the number of people making a decent full time living from someone paying them to teach debate is most likely less than 100. They include but are not limited to, people with coaching jobs at a handful of prestigious high schools (master’s sometimes required, at least a bachelor’s), and people who work for major debate organizations (your UDLs, a handful of academies across the nation, they don’t usually require a specific degree if you have a strong enough resume). With that said, the “market” of debate was growing really rapidly for a while until the pandemic dealt what I suspect was a really big blow. I don’t have the exact numbers or anything. So I think there’s 2 ways it can go from here. Either debate as an activity becomes too small to be sustainable (which is a problem we’re facing right now), OR, debate figures things out and comes up with a sustainable and appealing competitive model. If THAT happens, then I think it’s going to be ready for the boom in interest that I think is going to happen soon and there’s going to be more places wanting to hire debate coaches or pay for debate services than there has been in many years. If we don’t make the activity more sustainable and appealing, then I think that boom in interest will come and go like it did around 2008.
