Usually the older the students you are teaching and the more advanced the curriculum the more prestige the job carries. It doesn't mean their job is any more important, though.
We have publicly funded college that allows school and teacher choice. We tend to hold those people we choose to associate with in higher esteem then those we are forced to deal with like through the k-12 model where choice is scrapped for zip code mandates.
I certainly can't speak for everyone but my University professors (McMaster University - Hamilton, Ontario) were head and shoulders above my high school teachers. I went to a private high school in Sydney Australia and a public high school in suburban Toronto. Both high schools had good and bad teachers but even the good high school teachers paled in comparison to the professors at University. I wasn't a big fan of the teaching assistants at University (some were awful), but I was lucky enough to have only professors for most of my classes.
There are tons of bad teachers in colleges and universities around the country because you become a professor based on knowledge in your field not pedagogy. Many know tons more than their high school and lower counterparts, in fact, many use the professor's writings as content material, but professors never learned the teaching profession. That is not to say there aren't many bad teachers at the high school and lower level, I just expect them to know better since they have been trained to teach and many professors have not.
Should governor of Texas be held in the same esteem as a town councilman? Of course not. They may do similar things, but they're on totally different levels. Just the same, someone teaching on the doctorate level isn't really comparable (insofar as their occupation) to a kindergarten teacher.
Just depends, but probably in most cases the answer is yes. With the growth of dual-enrollment programs in high schools, college professors are becoming defacto HS teachers though.
Oh, yes there's a difference. The K-12 teachers treat the students like kids and talk down to them. The Professors get to talk at a higher level but expect the students to show a minimum level of adult responsibility.
