That sounds about right. For academia, that's quite high. It's what full professors make, and it's much harder to get tenure at a good (top-50) university than to make 1m+/year in finance.
Right, that was my point, that mid-career researchers don't make the starting salary of elite professionals. The starting salary of a Biglaw associate is 160k at the top firms in the large markets, that's beyond what even a full professor makes in many cases. Which only makes the OP's argument stronger - "hard to turn down a job where you make double what a mid-career researcher with a PhD would make".
