Why are academic salaries lower than commonly assumed? | Hacker News Reader

Why are academic salaries lower than commonly assumed?

chronicle.com

12 pointsalexwg19 comments

"When I try to explain why professors at small, private universities -- where tuition costs tend to be high -- usually earn significantly less than faculty members at more-affordable public universities, people shake their heads at the absurdity of academe."

The people at the more-affordable public universities are usually there more for research than teaching. They are getting paid substantially more because the research brings in many more dollars than tuition nets. The professors that get big university research jobs are also usually from top notch, competitive programs. The numbers she is looking at for big universities still includes profs in areas like creative writing, but also the higher paid economics, engineering, and cs professors.

"But if the average person reading U.S. News assumes that characterization is accurate -- the same person who, perhaps, sits on the governing board of a university and approves faculty raises each year -- then it's no wonder that faculty salaries are as low as they are on many campuses."

Wait. Does anyone in academia actually take US News that seriously?

Why do people who want to do research go into academia? It seems like the economics are just completely not favorable in academia -- you have to spend a lot of time teaching and doing other overhead and you barely get any pay. It seems like the only economically rational reason to become a professor is a love of teaching for its own sake. Maybe it makes sense because you get underlings for free...?

Man, I don't mean to comment-whore this thread, but it happens to be one of the topics I know the most about :)

I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. Access to grant funding. It's really hard to get granting organizations to take you seriously if you are applying for monies unattached.

2. Teaching load actually isn't that much of a concern for people at big research universities. One of my mentors described it like this: you have "cosmopolitan" professors and "hometown" professors. The cosmopolitans are always presenting their work, speaking at conferences where they were invited, and bringing in huge grants. They don't do much committee work, they don't have teaching loads (or, when they do, they hire someone to do the teaching for them). This leaves them plenty of time to concentrate on writing (or managing their ghostwriters aka grad students, spouses, research assistants, etc), presenting, researching, and publishing. The hometown faculty actually do all of the "dirty" work of running the university: sitting on committees, teaching, designing policy, etc.

3. They do get a cadre of grad students to help them out. Basically, they get to hand-pick a research team and work with them for 3-10 years (this happens more at large research universities and with senior faculty). These students are there to work with you because their interests and/or past work somehow connect with what you are doing (research interests, publication plans, lab work, etc).

4. Teaching a graduate-level seminar isn't like teaching an intro to technology or English 101. It's mentally tough and rigorous for everyone involved, including (and, you might argue, especially) the faculty. You have to be on your game, every week. And good faculty will use these seminars to develop and flesh out new ideas, concepts, and arguments. Like your cadre of grad students, this is another place where you get to exchange ideas on things that YOU are interested in.

That's just a couple of the reasons I think people go into it. However, I do think that opportunities to do work at this level will continue to shrink as universities are seen, more and more, as a place where you go to get trained for a job. It isn't too distant in the future that we will start seeing standardization movements in higher ed. Then you'll get everyone teaching to the test rather than their passions.

Research professors spend much more time doing research than teaching. Usually you love doing it which offsets some of the monetary compensation issues. Also, "barely get any pay" is relative. It depends on where you live, the type of school, the department, seniority, and in some cases whether you do something like spending your summers consulting.

Where do you think people who want to do research should go?

Seriously. I have friends who once worked in Agilent Labs. Now Agilent Labs is gone. I have had many professors and bosses who worked at Bell Labs. Now Bell Labs is gone.

There are small companies that do funded research. There are grants earmarked for companies like that, and it keeps them afloat. But you have to spend a lot of time just to raise small amounts of money.

A library? That's what I do...

(I'm funding my study time by working part time in chunks as a software contractor.)

Barely get any pay?

$77k, one of the numbers cited, is hardly a pittance. Okay, you can reasonably easily make a lot more by selling yourself on the open market (especially in IT) but if academia and research is what you want to do, $77k is pretty livable in all but the most expensive of locales.

The story lists £70k as the salary for a full professor. I worked in the UK as an assistant professor for 7 years, having to re-apply for my job every year. Finally I admitted that per hour worked burger-flippers were being paid more than me. I left, got a job in IT support in an accountancy firm. Within 5 years I was the lead developer, because everyone else in the IT department was dumb or lazy or both. Per hour I was earning 1000% more than as a teacher. The truth is that US and UK societies do not really respect education - school is fundamentally a child-minding service, university is a rite of passage. School teachers have more industrial strength than university teachers, because if the schools close the lack of child-minding causes far more problems.

"Pamela Johnston is an associate professor of English studies at Texas Lutheran University, where she teaches creative writing and American literature."

Supply and Demand. There you go.

I was thinking the same thing.

If you want to know why university professors are paid so little, simply count the number of underemployed PhDs who would kill for their jobs.

This is true. Many departments are granted budget depending on their PhD student headcount (and where headcount doesn't determine budget it often determines prestige). This leads to two things: 1) no consideration for the actual demand for PhD recipients; and 2) no impetus to actually get students out of the program. When I was at University of Chicago, their anthropology PhD program had an average completion time of eight years! Of course, many of those got opportunities for tenure-track employment. Still...

True enough. Talk to a professor in an area where there is a high-salaried non-academic job market (business, medicine, engineering, CS) and see if you get a different answer.

I thought a CS professor only makes $70k - $90k, even at a prestigious university.

The CS professors at small schools can make about half that.

I'm reasonably sure this isn't the case. Even in pure math, postdoc salaries tend to start at $50k ($45k in low cost of living areas like Urbana Champaign). Associate (tenure track, but not yet tenured) profs tend to start at $70k. I can guarantee you engineering/CS makes significantly more.

However, the average professor makes very little, because the average professor (of, e.g., Medieval English Literature) has few marketable skills.

http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/

Only by institution though..

That doesn't jibe well with tuition increases at an unbelievable scale (40% from 2000 to 2005 according to Marc Bousquet - http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/who-benefits-from...). The California State University system has seen tuition increases of 55% since 2002.

And I tend to agree with his analysis: money is flooding to an ever-increasing administrative layer while more and more classes are taught by "cheap" adjunct faculty who have zero job security and no opportunity for professional development. In his estimates, and for sure at the California state school I am most familiar with, adjuncts are now teaching 70-75% of courses, compared with rates as low as 20-25% in the past.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former adjunct university teacher :)

Exactly. It's because there are so many people, like that author, who are willing to continue on at a low salary and do nothing about it but whine on blogs. If they start leaving en masse to greener pastures, the salary will rise.

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