Comment by pw0ncakes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pw0ncakes | Hacker News Reader

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But senior, tenured faculty at elite schools are firmly entrenched in the well-compensated professional class (top salaries at elite schools often exceed $150,000; and for scholars in economics, business and law schools, earnings can be substantially in excess of that) with superior benefits, such as university-subsided housing, lifetime heath care and seven-figure retirement accounts. Once tenure has been achieved, generally after less than ten years of work, top college teachers face no professional risk and, by and large, teach three or fewer courses a semester.

3 courses per semester is a lot of work if you're doing it right, especially when you consider the amount of time research can take. 8-10 hours per week is a good estimate of the amount of time each class takes.

Also, very few professors make $150k-- those are the stars-- and they tend to be in their late 30s if not 40s. Academic pay is 1/5 to 1/10 of what it is in other industries (and yes, it's harder to become a tenured professor than to make $1 million/year on Wall Street).

American tuition is ridiculous, but overcompensation of teaching staff is not the problem. With tuition at $40,000/year for 10 classes, that's $4000 per class. If average class size is 25, that's $100k for 150 hours of the professor's work ($667/hour). So a professor is bringing in $500+k through teaching alone. For that professor to be making $65k (more realistic than the $150k figure) is not overcompensation.

Your source to show the accuracy of any of these estimates is?

which estimates are you contesting? as someone involved tangentially in academia, none of these even raise an eye brow. you might as well be asking for sources that the sun will rise tomorrow.

if you really want hard numbers, pick your favorite public university. poke around. their faculty salaries will be public record. also, the student feedback on faculty will be public record. you should be able to figure out the average number of courses taught, and the average salary in about 10 minutes after you find the relevant excel spreadsheets.

a 3 credit hour course will involve at least 3 hours of work per week (you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in). a minimum of 1 office hour per week. you've got to come up with homeworks, and grade them. even if you look at 25 students' homework for only 1 minute each, that'll take about half an hour. so it takes 4.5 hours each just to do the bare minimum possible work for a class.

google for "average college tuition" to cover that part.

what's left?

"Publish or perish."

The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part.

Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research.

From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

Professors work. A lot. Maybe not the ancient tenured ones, and not all of them, but the majority. It is far from a 40-hour job. And in the hard sciences/engineering/computer science, they could definitely be making more money in industry.

My point is that professors aren't overcompensated, because they "bring in" about $100k per class of tuition, which is about $667/hour-- although obviously deductions need to be made for administrative costs, classes are the main service-- assuming 150 hours of work per class, but are paid substantially less.

The fact that they also do research as a full-time job means that they're even less overcompensated (by which I mean, "more undercompensated").

you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in

Commuting time wouldn't be counted if we are comparing jobs in academia to jobs in other sectors of the economy.

average college tuition

Most students attending most colleges pay no more than list price for tuition, and at some colleges many students pay considerably less. (This fact, of course, partly goes against some statements in the original article, but it also goes against the statement in the grandparent comment that a student enrollment of x in a class necessarily generates a revenue stream for the college of x times the enrollment.)

That's why I'm asking for specifics. Someone here made factual claims. At least one of those claims is implausible to me (that any one professor develops massive revenue for his college by his classroom teaching activity). I base that on my college experiences, and on my current experiences in other teaching occupations. But with more specifics, we will all have a better sense of how comparable academic employment really is to other forms of employment.

er, didn't mean commuting. i meant, you have to be in the same room as the class you're teaching. and you have to stay there, for the scheduled time. the course is going to run 9AM to 10AM, and you, the professor, don't get to go somewhere else during that time.

even if there is distance teaching, you have to stop what you're doing, turn on your video conferencing program, and pretend to address the course material for 1 hour, as opposed to doing whatever else it is you want to do for that hour.

and even if a particular student is themselves paying less, any loans originated by non-university sources, or scholarships from outside the university, etc become university income. only grants, loans, work studies, etc, originated by the university itself wouldn't be new income.

so, yes, the average income per student will be less than the advertised average tuition, it will also be higher than what the average student is paying. (huzzah, upper and lower bounds!)

Which of these estimates do you disagree with?

A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year B. Average course size: 25 C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10 D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000 E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000.

This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following:

Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.

Average course size: 25

This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.)

So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)?

For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.

I went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.

http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/faculty/previous_...

Yeah, that seems to back up what I was talking about for undergrad courses. I'm sure this course I'm looking at with 680 enrollment brings up the average a bit... 772, 480, 280, 330, 248, 260, 223... and there are a good number in the 50-100 range.

The grad courses of course have smaller class sizes since they're the long tail of education, but that's not what we're talking about here. If you remove the courses with 0 undergrads, the average is probably not below 25.

For our analysis, it's the mean and not the median that matters, since we're talking about the sum of money brought in by professor teaching divided by the number of professors.

From first glance, it looks like the median is quite possibly below 25, but the mean isn't, if you only look at undergraduate courses.

Also, professional schools have huge class sizes and charge tuition at the same or an even higher level.

The Common Data Set figures are gathered by a standardized methodology (dictated in large part by the methodology of reports colleges are required to make to the federal government). Here's a pretty comprehensive list of publicly posted Common Data Set filings for colleges.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection...

(Go to near the end of this long thread for the latest updated alphabetized list.)

The tuition revenue per professor indicated in the HN comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063

is simply too high. That was a wild guess, not a statement based on actually doing research.

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