How much are professors paid?
ifweassume.com
ifweassume.com
The overall average for this is about $3,000/course, but I believe this is brought down by small private & for-profit schools. At a typical public school $4000/course is a good rule of thumb. Teaching more than 4 courses is a significant load, and some schools limit it to 3 or 4 courses/semester, but let's assume 4 courses in the spring, 4 in the fall, 2 in the summer. That puts the yearly gross at $40,000/year. That's probably a livable wage in many parts of the country, but keep in mind this does not include things like sick or vacation pay, health insurance, retirement plans, or other benefits.
EDIT: I should point out that the above is, for the most part, a best-case scenario for adjuncts. It often isn't possible to get full teaching loads, or doing so requires piecing together a course here or there at multiple schools. Income in the $25,000 range is not uncommon.
Yes, I specifically showed an optimistic picture of adjunct work so it didn't seem like I was tanking the numbers, but I should have said as much. I've gone back and edited it to reflect that my presentation is more of a best-case scenario.
I wish taxpayers had a union.
When you’re geographically locked, the universities become effective monopsonies everywhere but NY, Boston, etc
Not unlike unions that hire a negotiator to work on their behalf, if the negotiator ignored the contractual priorities given to them by the unions.
For comparison if you are full time faculty at a research (i.e. R1) oriented department, a 1-1 or 1-2 (e.g. 2 - 3 courses a year) is typically considered a full time teaching load on top of your research, although you often have a graduate seminar or two on top of that. If your department focuses on teaching, a 4-4 load is typical. "Teaching relief" is given to new and productive research faculty. Summer courses are often taught for extra income, and/or can be applied to soft salary. Similar things mutatis mutandi if you aren't on a semester system.
Yes, I specifically showed an optimistic picture of adjunct work so it didn't seem like I was tanking the numbers, but I should have said as much. I've gone back and edited it to reflect that my presentation is more of a best-case scenario.
Absolutely. Most adjuncts and non-tenured professors are paid surprisingly low wages, and many colleges are relying more and more on them (probably because they're so much cheaper).
This dynamic places a downward pressure on what institutions are able to spend of human resources. Adjuncts proliferate, and so do certain types of part time hourly jobs (little/no benefits) that are typical administrative tasks. I'm familiar with an example where fully half of their professional academic advising staff were hourly non-benefit. And quality advising is actually a revenue center, keeping students on track, helping when problems arise that might otherwise prevent a student from continuing their education.
Ask yourself: how does one pay off six figures of accumulated undergraduate and graduate debt on 25 grand a year? Answer: you never do. Now imagine that you get to compete with hundreds of other PhDs entering the workforce for this "privilege."
Adjuncting is a silent scandal and the entire university system deserves to burn for it.
That is not bad. The university/department ranking seemed to affect the salary only a little. The cost of living surprisingly affected the salary very little. This means you could make 130k while living in an extremely cheap area, but living in an expensive area you would not make much more.
Of course, many fields don't pay anywhere near that. Some pay quite a bit more (business!).
Disclaimer: I'm tenure-track faculty at a public R1 university.
If you are currently tenure track at an R1, I would expect that most of your other offers were from a similar tier. So while there may not be a huge difference in salaries between the top-ranked and the 30th ranked school in your discipline, there likely is one between the 30th ranked and the 300th or 1,000th. I'd be curious to see the analysis in the linked article run on the California data, where there are multiple top-tier research universities as well an extensive CSU system. Maybe I'm even the person to do that analysis...
It would be helpful if I could select a field, a position (e.g., assistant prof), a range of school rankings, number of years since hired (e.g., hired last year), and a geographical region, and see the salary data.
I hope it's not too much of a stretch to see the difference between a professor of medicine and medieval tapestry or Viking theology
I would like to do research full-time some day, but considering that completing my bachelors and then getting my PhD can get incredibly expensive, it gives me pause if I know that my salary is going to be cut in half in the process.
Anyway, my point in the previous post though, and I realize that I didn't express this terribly clearly, was that it's a bit upsetting that people who work really hard and dedicate themselves enough to become a professor end up making a pretty pathetic amount of money in proportion to their effort.
Is this different in the US?
I think in the US everyone just automatically gets the title 'professor.'
1. Assistant Professor
2. Associate Professor
3. [Full] Professor
As far as I know, you should only use the title "Prof." to refer to a "full" professor, and "Dr." for assistant and associate professors. In reality, everyone is just referred to as a "professor".
My University also has a few other titles: Acting Prof, Research Prof, and of course Prof Emeritus
All three types are generally referred to as "professor" but they differ in their seniority.
But it is reasonably common, unlike in (say) the UK.
You have instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. There's also such things as visiting professor (temporary postition) or professor emeritus (used to be a professor).
[0]. https://www.bu.edu/handbook/appointments-and-promotions/clas...
The link you gave says "The granting of Tenure, discussed in “Tenure and Promotion on the Charles River Campus”, is a separate guarantee that is not implied by any of the titles discussed in this section."
The tenure document, for example, says that 'The award of tenure to an Assistant Professor shall include promotion to the rank of Associate Professor.' So 'tenured associate professor' is a tenured faculty role, in addition to the 'tenured professor' faculty, such as http://www.bu.edu/wheelock/dr-leslie-dietiker-promoted-to-as... .
Perhaps there's a difference in terminology? My sense is that in academic circles, adjunct is now frequently used not for a specific position/title, but for the class of professionals who are hired on a semester by semester basis and paid by the class. Whereas the assistant/associate/full professor ladder is well defined most places, the adjunct position is more of an afterthought. It's temporary/disposable labor.
In my experience it's a professional affiliation that is flexible, designating that you are not a student, but not regular faculty. In some cases it designates a sessional lecturer (i.e. paid by the course, not full time, no job security), but it can also be used to associate someone in the department for the purposes of contributing to research or co-supervising a student. So you can end up being an adjunct for a department for a while without ever having been employed by them directly.
Originally it was much more the latter use, and not the former, but as the use of non-TT instructors grew some places used adjunct for this, others "lecturer", "sessional" etc.
If you're trying to more narrowly say "all instructors are considered professors", that's not true at any institution type, not even R1 (major research Universities)
https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20S...
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that PDF - it doesn't even mention the word!
An associate professor would at least be tenure-track.
Have you never heard of 'adjunct professors' in the US?
> An associate professor
In most countries people at the level of just associate professor don't call themselves 'professor.'
> like some Ph.D graduates might insist on being called 'Doctor' even though they're not a medical doctor
The title 'doctor' means you have a doctorate, or in some cases like the UK it's also used as a courtesy title for a medical professional with just a bachelors degree. PhDs, EngDs, DPhils, DLs, MDs, and more are all entitled to use it as much as each other.
Just looking at nominal salary also misses out on important subtleties. For example, med school professors primarily doing research are often expected to pay their own salaries out of grants (since many of them do very little teaching or practice medicine), whereas clinical professors (e.g., those who teach in hospitals) get a salary. The former category is much less stable as it is contingent upon sustained research funding, but the second will not leave time for research (nor would it be expected).
Source: I'm tenured at an R1 university in the US.
- several (maybe most) state universities in the US publish the salaries of their professors. Some state universities publish comprehensive (creepy?) granular data, e.g., a spreadsheet with each row displaying professor name, professor salary, rank, department.
- aggregated statistics (across all fields, all ranks, tenure-track/non-tenure-track, etc) are useless because of the variance.
If you are getting an offer from a professor position, you can get very precise salary expectations by looking at this granular data. For instance, lookup the salary of professors in the hiring department joined a year or two before your offer. GlassDoor information pales in comparison.
I'd expand this to state governments. It depends on the state, but for some states you can find a lot of detailed salary information.
My understanding is this is practically a requirement for government employees, so if the university is public, this data must be provided. Similarly, you can look up the salary/pay for most other government employees, although they're usually strict to scales.
Could you expound on that? How does the variance in underlying data cause aggregated statistics to lose usefulness?
- it's not clear if summer salary is included. Most tenure-track faculty in the U.S. are on a nine-month contract (sometimes paid out over nine months, and sometimes over 12), and this "salary" notionally comes from tuition or the state government. But many faculty in the sciences and engineering are also paid a "summary salary" that comes out of grant funding (typically grant funding that the faculty member participated in raising) or from the startup funding provided by the university to new faculty. This can increase a professor's total annual cash compensation by 33%.
- this is looking at salaries of public universities in one state.
- there can be a huge variation between disciplines (e.g. history vs. computer science vs. law vs. medicine) or between seniorities. Also between tenure-track faculty and everybody else (adjuncts, lecturers and instructors, teaching-track professors).
- professors often go on leave or otherwise aren't fully paid throughout the year, which can distort the average per-capita figures.
- professors in high cost-of-living areas sometimes receive important non-cash compensation from the univeresity, e.g. the university will provide below-market-rate rental apartments or originate mortgages.
- professors in law and engineering typically have other ways to make money that aren't generally afforded to other private-sector employees, e.g. professors receive "consulting privileges" (the lawyers can do legal work in private practice, and professors can consult n days per year), and they personally receive around 30% of the patent revenue that the university collects (for patents invented by the professor in their academic work and assigned to the university), etc.
One data point: I am an assistant professor (the lowest tenure-track rank) for a large private university in the U.S. in an engineering department in a high cost-of-living area, and my pre-tax cash compensation from the university is more than $225,000/year, included my summer salary that comes out of my grants, but not including the FMV of the below-market-rate mortgage benefit that the university offers to faculty and not counting consulting on the side. So not close to industry money, but a lot higher than the numbers in this article and higher than I think most people realize a junior engineering professor can make.
I spend all day doing useful analysis for science. On the internet, all I can hope for is doing mildly interesting work :D
This is broken down by region, size of school, state vs. local, seniority, title, etc.