> your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig
Why are you making stuff up?
These sorts of careless lies, which are all too common, can be hard on young people in college, or considering college, or otherwise. They're either trying to value their potential education or wondering why the fuck they aren't getting the job offers they should be getting because so many are telling them their degree is the gateway to instant riches, and you're not helping.
> the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that.
Wrong in a very different way here. You should stop.
Serious question: how many students and faculty currently at low-tier institutions have you talked with in the last two weeks? Two months? Two years? Do you sit on any boards or advisory panels at these types of institutions? Do you actively recruit from these types of institutions? I do. All of those things.
I know what I'm talking about. Stop being mean to me.
LACs pay junior faculty $65K and those faculty routinely place students in positions with >$150K total comp. These are facts, even at low tier colleges.
Every student? No. Some students every year? Absolutely. If you teach CS well and make $65K, almost all your students will make more than you do at their first position and many will make 2x-3x. More than enough that you'll start asking "why the hell am I here?"
> These sorts of careless lies...
This rant sounds extremely personal. Not going to touch this.
>> the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that.
> Wrong in a very different way here. You should stop.
Total comp out of a top CS PhD programs lately is around 200K-300K range with some outliers.
Total comp out of a top MBA program lately is around 100K-200K range with some outliers.
Average outcomes vary considerably. That's why my original post is properly conditioned on "top".
> LACs pay junior faculty $65K and those faculty routinely place students in positions with >$150K total comp. These are facts, even at low tier colleges.
You're leaving out a key fact, which is salary for academics is reported for 9-months, not 12.
A 9 month salary of $65k would put you at the bottom 10% of teaching faculty in the nation. The 50th percentile is more like $82k, which is $109k annualized. If you start at $65k, I think by the time you actually graduate any students you should be making a lot more than that. And if you're not, there's got to be some other reason why you're not making a more representative salary.
But yes, in general academics can make less than the students they graduate. Many academics are okay with that because:
1. It's really hard to put a value on not having a boss in the traditional sense.
2. It's also hard to put a value on getting 3 months off in the summer and 1 month off in the winter every year.
Then again, I guess it's not hard to put a value on that: it's whatever they forego in extra salary working in industry. In that sense while the students earn more, they don't 10 paid weeks off + 11 weeks unpaid vacation in the summer.
Well, yeah, my entire point is that those $65K places fail to hire/retain, precisely because they can't/won't pay and consider the bottom of the CRA range insanely generous/competitive. Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that point. The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.
What the CRA survey doesn't tell you is that a huge percentage of CS departments just have failed searches year after year. (And, actually, there is some CRA-E report somewhere that laments the incredible difficulty of hiring in CS.)
I can see a scenario where $65k would be attractive. If it were some small college in the middle of nowhere with a 3/3 course load, that would be a very attractive position for some people. I bet when you look into it though, those schools want something like a 5/5 load with min 3 preps. No thank you.
> The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.
What else would you expect from a thread that has attracted a bunch of academics? :P
> If it were some small college in the middle of nowhere with a 3/3 course load, that would be a very attractive position for some people.
Can't imagine who. Maybe the childless? Or perhaps folks with trust funds.
> I bet when you look into it though, those schools want something like a 5/5 load with min 3 preps. No thank you.
3/3 was available pre-COVID. But the pandemic turbo-charged the MBAification of higher ed.
Today? Maybe you can find 4/4, but the high prep count is real. Oh, and you're definitely the chair at some point before tenure. These are like 50-60 hour weeks if you're doing the job well. Not worth the short summer off (during which you will... sit around in the middle of nowhere and pinch pennies if you happen to have a family)
>> The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.
> What else would you expect from a thread that has attracted a bunch of academics? :P
I visibly winced when a dean told me about the unique allure of life immersed in academia ;-D
> If you teach CS well and make $65K, almost all your students will make more than you do at their first position and many will make 2x-3x
"Many" is a weasel word that adds a different flavor to your original assertion that "your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig." What you're saying is still crazy hyperbole. I simply cannot imagine what your source of data is here. A randomly chosen google hit shows that the average starting salary for a new CS undergrad is around $68k, which seems about right.
It is still, if we're being honest, probably a bit humbling for a junior professor to be making the same as a new graduate. But you had to lean into the "2x-3x" hyperbole...
>> These sorts of careless lies...
> This rant sounds extremely personal. Not going to touch this.
Oh, touch it. Young people trying to gauge the profession, higher education, and its' costs are going to read your comments. They are entering what is often a lucrative profession but they are not going to be making three times as much as their teachers. Why make stuff up? It's not helping anybody.
> Total comp out of a top CS PhD programs lately is around 200K-300K range with some outliers.
> Total comp out of a top MBA program lately is around 100K-200K range with some outliers.
This would be a lot more compelling if you provided citations. The salary numbers someone else provided for the Stanford MBA program, numbers which you were dismissive of, included range, median, and mode, and those numbers were higher. But the numbers I (and I suspect, anyone involved in the profession) are likely to be most skeptical about are the numbers you're talking about for CS PhD new grads. Those people will often gravitate towards postdoc and teaching positions, while the Masters students will often gravitate towards FAANG jobs.
To be honest I would be delighted to learn that newly graduated CS PhDs from top programs are making, on average, as much as those entering industry with a Masters, since it would probably signal a lot more money being put towards research. I'm pretty sure the numbers you're talking about would have them making twice as much as the new Masters grads, which, again, great! I would be delighted to learn it's true.
Dude. Sometimes is also a qualifier. It's right there in my original quote. WTF is this conversation even about anymore?
This is getting unbelievably pedantic.
Look, it's a thing at the 3 institutions I advise for their CS faculty to make below-market wages and for their graduates to make above-average wages. I think this pattern of facts is uniquely common at lower tier LACs with CS PhD on faculty. Those institutions pay uniquely low rates for CS faculty, but the value of LAC-style 1:1 mentorship from a CS PhD is enormous and consistently results in better than average placements.
I didn't claim this is the base case. I used conditioning words. Sometimes. Up to. From first post on-wards.
you can call me a liar. Whatever. This is real phenomenon. These situations exist. You've even conceded my fundamental point about this subset of CS PhDs AFAICT: that the jobs are plentiful and not particularly attractive.
Next, you claimed Stanford MBAs make more than Stanford CS PhDs because some Stanford CS PhDs choose academia (and, yes, the Stanford CS PhDs who choose industry make more than their MBA counter-parts; go look at levels.fyi). That's all fine and well. Probably true. here's the thing, though. My top-most post in this thread explicitly preconditioned this branch of the conversation on "CS PhDs who choose industry". So at this point I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Clearly, we're so far down-thread that the plot is completely lost.
The pedantry is trying my patience. Go back and read my original post. Is there any aspect of that basic thesis that you actually disagree with in a substantive way?
> the salary numbers someone else provided for the Stanford MBA program, [...] and those numbers were higher.
Standford is widely-regarded as one of the very tippy-top MBA programs. The Economist ranks them #5 (but #1 in post-MBA earnings). FT ranks them #2 and US News and World Report ranks them #1.
I don't consider a PhD to be in any way equivalent to a MBA. As far as training goes, a PhD is about how to do research. The result often in fact is a step down in salary. Plus it seems to be very difficult to find any recent data on salaries.
Why are you making stuff up?
These sorts of careless lies, which are all too common, can be hard on young people in college, or considering college, or otherwise. They're either trying to value their potential education or wondering why the fuck they aren't getting the job offers they should be getting because so many are telling them their degree is the gateway to instant riches, and you're not helping.
> the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that.
Wrong in a very different way here. You should stop.