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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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 :)

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..

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.

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...

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