<p>Re post #56 ^^^^,</p>
<p>Pretty interesting to look at data on faculty salaries, but I think tk21769 mischaracterizes the data in post #56 by calling it “average salaries for full professors.” The source from which the data is drawn (stateuniversity.com) say it represents “average full-time faculty salaries.” There’s a big difference. </p>
<p>Many* full-time faculty *are associate professors or assistant professors; the latter are almost invariably paid less than “full professors”. And because the mix is different at different schools, comparing average full-time faculty salaries at institution A with those at institution B may be very misleading. Some schools do a lot of entry-level and junior lateral hiring; their faculty will be on average younger and less well paid. Other institutions do very little entry-level hiring, preferring to hire only mid-career (or sometimes even very senior) people whose careers and reputations are already well established; those schools will have higher average salaries because their faculty is on average older, more senior, and more heavily weighted toward (highly paid) full professors, with fewer assistant and associate professors.</p>
<p>Better data, which allows you to compare full professor salaries to full professor salaries, associate professor salaries to associate professors salaries, and so on, is collected by the American Association of University Professors, and made available online by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s just a small sample:</p>
<p>2010-2011 average full professor salary</p>
<p>Harvard $193.800
University of Michigan $146,900
Middlebury College $120,100</p>
<p>Now it looks like Harvard has a distinct edge, but keep in mind these figures aren’t adjusted for cost of living. According to a pretty reliable cost-of-living comparison calculator, you’d need to earn $257,586 to have the same purchasing power in Cambridge, MA that you get for $146,900 in Ann Arbor, mainly because housing is almost triple the cost in Cambridge. Of course, most Harvard faculty can’t afford to live in Cambridge anymore, but there’s still a big cost of living differential in Boston (53% more expensive than Ann Arbor) or surrounding towns. Bottom line then, while Harvard definitely pays more, once you consider cost of living the salaries are pretty competitive.</p>
<p>Middlebury, VT is 14% more expensive than Ann Arbor, so that Middlebury College salary, already 22% lower than the Michigan salary in nominal terms, is even further eroded by a higher cost of living. </p>
<p>LACs generally do have a lower pay scale than research universities, but that also may not be a head to head comparison. The AAUP data excludes medical school salaries, but I believe business school and law school salaries are included, which would tend to skew average salaries somewhat higher at universities with those schools. So, for example, Brown, which doesn’t have a business school or a law school, comes out with an average full professor salary of $150,700, lowest among the Ivies.</p>
<p>Michigan’s average full professor salary is right in the ballpark with many private research universities in addition to Brown, e.g., Carnegie Mellon ($138,900), Notre Dame ($146,800), Boston College ($149,900), USC ($151,000), Vanderbilt ($151,300), Rice ($155,200), Dartmouth ($157,700), Cornell ($157,800), and Georgetown ($158,900). HYPS are higher, but as previously noted they are also in higher cost-of-living areas.</p>
<p>With few exceptions, LACs are a distinct notch lower: Reed ($106,800 average for a full professor) and Claremont McKenna ($145,200) represent the low and high ends of the range for the most selective LACs, with most somewhere around the Middlebury level (about $120K).</p>