Professor Salaries?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>It’s a crazy world! Professional athletes and coaches make way more than they should…</p>

<p>The ND coaching thread over on the Parent’s Forum made me wonder about professor salaries. Does anybody know what a tenure-track professor starting salary is? How 'bout a seasoned/experienced prof? For example, a liberal arts prof? I’m guessing the sciences/technical/engineering professors would make more, although I’m not sure about that.
Do salaries vary greatly depending on the institution? Seems they have some nice perks–some only teach 2 or 3 courses at a time. Believe my friend’s S only teaches 2 courses, (trimester system) making it 6 courses per year. They often have their summers off and get great benefits, including sabbatical time. Believe it’s every 5 years or so–they get paid to study, travel, etc. Not really coming up with any negatives, now that I think about it!!</p>

2

<p>Depends on the subject. A few years ago, NYU was offering $35k for an assistant professor in Korean. But then, language professors get **** pay and work more. On the other end, law professors or business professors probably make 6 digits starting.</p>

3

<p>Depends on the university and within the university, it depends on the discipline. Sciences and Business get more, humanities and social sciences get less. (Much of this has to do with skills transferrable to industry.) Professional schools - law and medicine - usually get the most.</p>

<p>At public universities, salaries are public record. You should be able to find them on the web.</p>

4

<p>My dh started out at $40,000 twenty years ago at a med school - I think starting salaries are twice that now. His teaching load may seem light, but he’s chasing grant money and writing papers all the time. He works 12-14 hours weekdays, and probably puts in another 10 hours most weekends. He’s never had a sabbatical.</p>

5

<p>^^^ That is why they always say for profs it is a WRITE OR DIE career.</p>

<p>My nephew is a ph.D candidate that will be a TA in Berlin this yr on the dime of U Chicago. They are paying his housing, tuition and giving him a small stipend, but not bad in the end since his ph.D is free.</p>

<p>I also agree it depends on the colleges regarding salary and the min requirements. You would expect an MIT robotics prof to make more than the Lit prof, however you would also expect both of them to make more than their equivalent at Rowan College.</p>

<p>If you look at the pretty brochures colleges send they always state stats about their profs, and highlight reknown ones. Profs are contracted, so if you are named as one of those profs, you have better negotiationing power than someone who is an adjunct. Adjuncts are hired to fill in and by semester to semester, WHen you see TBA by the course, don’t be schocked if it lands up being an adjunct. There are good and bads with adjuncts, but I am sure those that took Constitutional law with an adjunct named Barack Obama had no complaints.</p>

6

<p>It really depends on the discipline, as the above posters have said. And while six courses a year sounds like an easy load, it really is not. Remember that includes all the course prep, grading, etc. A good professor does not simply redo the same course ever semester, they are constantly updating,expanding, revising the course, etc. A seminar course, with 18 students, who each writes 2 papers and 2 exams can equal almost a full 40 hours just in grading. Multiply that times six and a professor can spend six weeks out of the year just grading papers. Add in consulting with students about those papers, allowing students to rewrite, regrading those rewirtes, it adds up quickly. </p>

<p>In the liberal arts pay can be pretty low starting out and it doesn’t grow very fast. Many institutions make across the board wage increases by percentages and that favors those disciplines that make more coming in. In addition, when things get tight for an institution, faculty pay freezes are almost always among the first cost cutting measures.</p>

<p>My husband, who teaches in the liberal arts at a top tier LAC, when asked what students should learn if they want to teach in the liberal arts always says “Car repair. If you teach you will always drive a clunker, and you’ll never have the cash to pay someone else to fix it for you.”</p>

<p>All that being said, he would not do any thing else. He loves working with students, he loves the fact that he gets to keep growing in his own intellectual life while taking students with him, he loves seeing students grow in their abilities, understanding and thought. </p>

<p>In regards to post #3 in some states salaries are only published once they reach a certain level ( in Iowa it is $65,000) so there will be a lot of professors who fall under that number that you will not see. Most liberal arts professors over that threshold are senior professors, so take those records with a grain of salt.</p>

7

<p>Ok, if professors are not getting paid, then where is my 50,000 going each year?</p>

8

<p>I looked at a jobs board at my son’s school and humanities offerings were in the 30s. Business, science and engineering offerings were higher and, in some cases, much, much higher.</p>

9

<p>Yes, BC, but is your sons school a LAC or are they trying to get science oriented students?</p>

<p>I am betting the prof at Julliard that teaches music, makes more than the prof that teaches quantum math.</p>

<p>It really comes down to what the school is trying to obtain when recruiting students.</p>

10

<p>Recently the UConn basketball coach’s salary came under fire:</p>

<p>“At a post-game press conference blogger/reporter Ken Krayeske asked Jim Calhoun, Connecticut’s highest paid state employee as head coach of the UConn men’s basketball team, whether or not he would consider taking a pay cut to aid the financially troubled state. This did not go over well. Calhoun proceeded to ask the reporter if he was stupid then tell him repeatedly to shut up.”</p>

<p>Many CT state employees have taken voluntary pay cuts and are required to take a certain # of unpaid furlough days which is what led up to this questioning of the basketball coach. I, like many in CT, were surprised to learn that he was the highest paid state employee. Welcome to the real world, I guess.</p>

11

<p>New asst profs make from $35K to over $100K depending on field. Full profs make around $80K to well over $200K depending.</p>

12

<p>It’s not an LAC. The school brings in a lot of research money and some professors appear to make a lot more from their research (and consulting?) activities than they do from their salaries. I’ve seen job postings for CS professors and they explicitly state that you have to have a proven track record of bringing in research dollars. It was obvious that bringing in research money was more important than teaching ability. That’s kind of the way it is at state u research institutions.</p>

13

<p>As others note, it depends on type of school, private or public, and discipline. Doesn’t matter much how much the school values the discipline. As a general rule, disciplines where professors can get hired for a lot of money in industry tend to be paid a lot (e.g. finance, medicine, law) since the university is competing with those other employment opportunities to lure faculty in and also professional schools can actually be direct revenue generators for the university. Those in disciplines where you can’t make much money in general, such as art, music, history, universities do not pay so well since they aren’t competing with anyone (and there are far more people wanting teaching jobs than there are jobs, period).</p>

<p>In business schools (where I teach), at research universities at least, one starts around $125 and it goes up from there. Most tenured faculty at the top 20 and Ivies earn at least 200, and easily into the 400k range, especially if they are doing executive training (for example, I believe Wharton now pays $9,000 a day to its professors to each a group of executives). </p>

<p>At research universities you teach about 3-4 courses a year but it’s an extremely full time job and one does’t take summers off. This is because you are a researcher first and foremost. And along with research there is also course prepping, committee work, cases to write, supervising graduate students, meeting students, writing letters of rec, curriculum development, designing new courses, serving on boards, and on and on and on (what you see in the classroom as a student is just a tiny part of the job). Email alone could take a full day a week if you let it. </p>

<p>At a less research intensive school, you tend to earn less, and teach more but the expectations for research are lower. But teaching six-eight courses a year, along with the prep, curriculum work, student face time, and well that teaching load would consume most of your time. Little time for anything else.</p>

<p>As an aside, research funding doesn’t cover faculty salaries (at least not in my discipline), but it pays for graduate students, one’s lab, one’s expenses as it relates to doing research and funds back as tax to the university. It also signals the quality of the researcher. But the reason its so valued is you can’t do great research without great funding and the schools with the highest reputation are research schools. And great research institutions attract great researchers and the cycle continues. It’s what they value. Don’t completely knock it: without research there is no content to teach. Though I want my kids going to schools where the research faculty actually teach too (as it has been at every institution I’ve taught at).</p>

14

<p>This all goes back to the adage WRITE OR DIE.</p>

15

<p>“This all goes back to the adage WRITE OR DIE.” I thought it was publish or perish.</p>

16

<p>I guess the adage might be from the area you are from, but in the end, it is the same.</p>

<p>Spend your time as a prof teaching and you will not see tenure.</p>

17

<p>Well, you could look it up. The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an online version of an annual faculty survey done by the Association of American University Professors. You can look up individual schools or generate lists to compare. I don’t believe they give breakdowns by discipline, however.</p>

<p>[The</a> Chronicle: AAUP Faculty Salary Survey](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/]The”>http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/)</p>

18

<p>It’s only publish or perish if you are at a research school (while those are the schools everyone knows well, they are also greatly the minority). Being at a teaching school, the research expectations are way lower or non-existent. </p>

<p>And it’s an ‘up or out’ model. The out is bad: if you don’t get tenure after ~7 years, based on your research, you are fired (I guess that is where the perish comes from?). But the UP is great if you succeed: one gets tenure which, in practical terms, gives one security of lifetime employment.</p>

19

<p>"It was obvious that bringing in research money was more important than teaching ability. That’s kind of the way it is at XXXXXXX research institutions. "</p>

<p>Fixed it for you.</p>

20

<p>DS works for a recruited prof from CMU. Prof teaches maybe 1 course a year but has a lot of reseach thru the grad students and speaking engagements.</p>