
How much are professors paid? - mock_twain
https://www.ifweassume.com/2019/06/how-much-are-professors-paid.html
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ineedasername
Adjunct/non-tenure faculty should be kept in mind. Depending on the school,
somewhere between 40% and 70% is quite typical for instructors that are _not_
paid a salaried wage. Instead, they typically received a certain amount per
course taught.

The overall average for this is about $3,000/course, but I believe this is
brought down by small private & for-profit schools. At a typical public school
$4000/course is a good rule of thumb. Teaching more than 4 courses is a
significant load, and some schools limit it to 3 or 4 courses/semester, but
let's assume 4 courses in the spring, 4 in the fall, 2 in the summer. That
puts the yearly gross at $40,000/year. That's probably a _livable_ wage in
many parts of the country, but keep in mind this does not include things like
sick or vacation pay, health insurance, retirement plans, or other benefits.

EDIT: I should point out that the above is, for the most part, a best-case
scenario for adjuncts. It often isn't possible to get full teaching loads, or
doing so requires piecing together a course here or there at multiple schools.
Income in the $25,000 range is not uncommon.

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analog31
I was an adjunct for one semester, many years ago. I mentioned my experiences
to my mom, who is a retired high school teacher. Her response: "Now you know
why teachers have a union."

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mynameishere
Because the price determined by the market is wrong. Wrong!

I wish taxpayers had a union.

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arkades
Most adjuncts are in the business of selling their services to effective
monopsonies. Oligopolies, at best. Free market economics don’t exonerate the
result.

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xref
I don’t agree with the parent but calling the educational system a monopsony
sounds even less believable, there are tens of thousands of educational
institutions in America alone

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arkades
Most adjuncts - heck, most people - are not capable of moving around the
country chasing low-paying, often part-time jobs.

When you’re geographically locked, the universities become effective
monopsonies everywhere but NY, Boston, etc

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azhenley
When I was on the academic job market in 2017/2018, most of the CS faculty
positions I was applying to paid between 95-115k as the _9 month_ salary. So
with summary salary from your startup funds/grants it would pay a total salary
of 115-140k (assuming 2 months summer salary, which is common).

That is not bad. The university/department ranking seemed to affect the salary
only a little. The cost of living surprisingly affected the salary very
little. This means you could make 130k while living in an extremely cheap
area, but living in an expensive area you would not make much more.

Of course, many fields don't pay anywhere near that. Some pay quite a bit more
(business!).

Disclaimer: I'm tenure-track faculty at a public R1 university.

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rflrob
Anecdotally based on some skimming of the California version of the salary
database, there seems to be greater variation between fields than between
universities. My wife is in the humanities, and the mid-career salaries of the
professors at UCs in her field seem to be about the starting range for UC
professors in mine (biology).

If you are currently tenure track at an R1, I would expect that most of your
other offers were from a similar tier. So while there may not be a huge
difference in salaries between the top-ranked and the 30th ranked school in
your discipline, there likely is one between the 30th ranked and the 300th or
1,000th. I'd be curious to see the analysis in the linked article run on the
California data, where there are multiple top-tier research universities as
well an extensive CSU system. Maybe I'm even the person to do that analysis...

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yomly
Not to be condescending, but I should hope area of study should influence
expected earnings of an academic.

I hope it's not too much of a stretch to see the difference between a
professor of medicine and medieval tapestry or Viking theology

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avani
There is also a large difference between disciplines. Professors in
professional schools such as law, medicine, or business tend to make
significantly more than professors in the liberal arts (note: this includes
math, engineering, and CS many places).

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tombert
This depresses me a bit. I make substantially more than the average professor,
and I'm just an eccentric dropout working at a big megacorporation.

I would like to do research full-time some day, but considering that
completing my bachelors and then getting my PhD can get incredibly expensive,
it gives me pause if I know that my salary is going to be cut in half in the
process.

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chrisseaton
You can do full-time research in your megacorporation on your current salary
or higher, probably.

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tombert
Probably, I work for a tech company, pretty tricky to get that to those
positions without a PhD though. Not 100% sure how I'd get a PhD while working
full time; after emailing dozens of professors in the NYC area about this,
none of them got back to me about that.

Anyway, my point in the previous post though, and I realize that I didn't
express this terribly clearly, was that it's a bit upsetting that people who
work really hard and dedicate themselves enough to become a professor end up
making a pretty pathetic amount of money in proportion to their effort.

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chrisseaton
Something important to note when reading this is that at a university in the
US, almost everyone is a professor. That's why these pay ranges are so wide -
they include both very junior part-time staff and very senior world-class
full-time staff.

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stingraycharles
Could you elaborate a bit? I know that over here there are certain
requirements (needs to teach classes, publish at least one paper a year).

Is this different in the US?

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phw
You generally start as an assistant professor, which means you are on the
tenure track but you don't yet have tenure. After several years, if you did
well, you get promoted to associate professor, meaning that you got tenure.
Finally, after some more years, you turn into a full professor, at which point
you will likely earn the most.

All three types are generally referred to as "professor" but they differ in
their seniority.

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impendia
Promotion from associate professor to professor is not automatic; indeed,
there are several associate professors in my department who have been at that
rank for some time, and seem unlikely to get promoted.

But it is reasonably common, unlike in (say) the UK.

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kkylin
I'm not sure how meaningful this analysis is. First, as others have noted,
just having the word "professor" in the title doesn't mean much: both a full,
tenured professor and an untenured, adjunct professor would have the word
"professor." (In my field, mathematics, postdoctoral positions are often
called "visiting assistant professors"; these are not tenure-track positions.)
Second, again as others noted, salary varies widely across fields, e.g., a med
school professor will be paid a lot more than an English professor.

Just looking at nominal salary also misses out on important subtleties. For
example, med school professors primarily doing research are often expected to
pay their own salaries out of grants (since many of them do very little
teaching or practice medicine), whereas clinical professors (e.g., those who
teach in hospitals) get a salary. The former category is much less stable as
it is contingent upon sustained research funding, but the second will not
leave time for research (nor would it be expected).

Source: I'm tenured at an R1 university in the US.

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jknz
The take-away from this is that

\- several (maybe most) state universities in the US publish the salaries of
their professors. Some state universities publish comprehensive (creepy?)
granular data, e.g., a spreadsheet with each row displaying professor name,
professor salary, rank, department.

\- aggregated statistics (across all fields, all ranks, tenure-track/non-
tenure-track, etc) are useless because of the variance.

If you are getting an offer from a professor position, you can get very
precise salary expectations by looking at this granular data. For instance,
lookup the salary of professors in the hiring department joined a year or two
before your offer. GlassDoor information pales in comparison.

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klank
> aggregated statistics (across all fields, all ranks, tenure-track/non-
> tenure-track, etc) are useless because of the variance

Could you expound on that? How does the variance in underlying data cause
aggregated statistics to lose usefulness?

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jknz
Say you receive an offer for a specific position in a specific department and
hope to negotiate a better salary. Aggregated data averaged across all fields,
all universities and all ranks is not useful. However, the salaries of recent
hires, for the same specific position, in the same field at comparable
universities will give objective data (and possibly leverage) to negotiate
your offer.

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Ancalagon
Good data, just wish it was presented a little differently. I can't tell where
zero percent is for any of the salary graphs, and I'd also like to know the
median home value used for calculating the values in the second graph.
Otherwise, very informative post, thanks!

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aassddffasdf
Haha, right. I searched for "axis" to see if anyone was making this point
before I re-made it.

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throwaway8480
I think the data here are unfortunately pretty hard to interpret, in part
because:

\- it's not clear if summer salary is included. Most tenure-track faculty in
the U.S. are on a nine-month contract (sometimes paid out over nine months,
and sometimes over 12), and this "salary" notionally comes from tuition or the
state government. But many faculty in the sciences and engineering are also
paid a "summary salary" that comes out of grant funding (typically grant
funding that the faculty member participated in raising) or from the startup
funding provided by the university to new faculty. This can increase a
professor's total annual cash compensation by 33%.

\- this is looking at salaries of public universities in one state.

\- there can be a huge variation between disciplines (e.g. history vs.
computer science vs. law vs. medicine) or between seniorities. Also between
tenure-track faculty and everybody else (adjuncts, lecturers and instructors,
teaching-track professors).

\- professors often go on leave or otherwise aren't fully paid throughout the
year, which can distort the average per-capita figures.

\- professors in high cost-of-living areas sometimes receive important non-
cash compensation from the univeresity, e.g. the university will provide
below-market-rate rental apartments or originate mortgages.

\- professors in law and engineering typically have other ways to make money
that aren't generally afforded to other private-sector employees, e.g.
professors receive "consulting privileges" (the lawyers can do legal work in
private practice, and professors can consult n days per year), and they
personally receive around 30% of the patent revenue that the university
collects (for patents invented by the professor in their academic work and
assigned to the university), etc.

One data point: I am an assistant professor (the lowest tenure-track rank) for
a large private university in the U.S. in an engineering department in a high
cost-of-living area, and my pre-tax cash compensation from the university is
more than $225,000/year, included my summer salary that comes out of my
grants, but not including the FMV of the below-market-rate mortgage benefit
that the university offers to faculty and not counting consulting on the side.
So not close to industry money, but a lot higher than the numbers in this
article and higher than I think most people realize a junior engineering
professor can make.

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threwawasy1228
Not a very useful analysis, there are various levels of pay-grade and they all
except the lowest ranks, often have 'professor' in their job titles. eg.
Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, Professor, Professor Emeritus,
Visiting Professor, and sometimes Contract Professor.

~~~
SubiculumCode
It is wide ranging for sure. I think most starting assistant professors start
in the 50 to 75k range. In Cal State, your salary will start on the lower end,
and go up incrementally. If in the University of California system, it will
start in the upper end, and within 6-10 years, your salary will have doubled.

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aassddffasdf
Would be nice to have an actual y-axis on those charts. No way to tell the
difference between near zero and zero for the various schools.

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seancoleman
I’m an adjunct faculty at ASU and make $4,000/year for one course. This
stipend is a nice gesture but I do it for the kids.

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chirau
What happens if you teach multiple sections of the same course? Like a morning
section and an evening section? Do you get paid double or once?

~~~
seancoleman
ASU explicitly disallows adjunct faculty from holding multiple courses. I have
no idea why.

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markc
The highest paid professor in the University of Massachusetts System makes
$468k/year. Of the state's highest paid employees, 58 of 60 work for UMass.
(Top non-UMass employee comes in at #32)
[http://cthrupayroll.mass.gov/#!/year/2018/full_time_employee...](http://cthrupayroll.mass.gov/#!/year/2018/full_time_employees,others/pay1,pay2,pay3,pay4/explore/0-0-0/trans_no)

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ModernMech
If you want some real data for computer science, there is a survey conducted
every year on this topic: [https://cra.org/resources/taulbee-
survey/](https://cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey/)

This is broken down by region, size of school, state vs. local, seniority,
title, etc.

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cybersnowflake
Yup, 'professor' covers everything from adjuncts who are one step from freshly
graduated grad students with the pay to match and eminent figures with entire
departments under them and decades of connections.

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purplezooey
I like how we just casually analyze public salaries but if you did this for
any comparably large company, it would be far, far more f'd up.

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RickJWagner
Wow. All those college bucks are _not_ going to Prof salaries.

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cosmodisk
Tl;dr Not much...

