The professors salaries aren’t usually the reason behind rising tuition costs, except for a few superstars at a few wealthy institutions. However, universities have been hit hard by rising healthcare costs, like many other businesses.
And big increased in support staff.
But then, undergrads and their parents now want (or see as selling points) robust career counseling, study-abroad opportunities, mental health facilities, athletic facilities, food that’s better than the slop served in college cafeteria a generation ago, various centers (like entrepreneurship), writing centers, trips to different cities, etc. All that takes more people and more money.
Of course, added support staff brings added medical insurance costs, even if the support staff is not as well paid as faculty.
How many would choose a low cost college with the bare minimum:
- Academic instruction, but courses could be very big for efficiency.
- Records and transcripts.
- Mandated services (e.g. ADA accommodations).
- Housing is a web site for local landlords to post listings aimed at students.
- Career center is a web site for job listings and a phone number for employers to call to book rooms for recruiting events.
Another piece, at public schools, is furloughs. A good friend of mine is a professor at a state flagship and a number of years ago the state was in a budget crunch and required all state employees to be furloughed for one day a week. This turned into a 20% pay reduction for all state employees but it hit certain professions harder than others.
In some professions the reduction hurt but did come with the benefit of an extra day off so there was a proportional reduction in expenses (commute, laundry, etc.) however some, including professors were hard hit, in that classes were not cancelled that one day a week and the expectation from everyone involved was that there was still a 5 day work week. The state lost a lot of the non-tenured professors that year because of the potential for future budget crisis’ and the prospect of further reduced income with no reduced workload.
A number of studies have attributed the rising costs of higher education to a bloated administrative staff, including “too many deans” of this and that. A lot of the apparent bloat comes about b/c of required compliance with state and federal laws either mandating services to special populations, or compliance with regulations concerning safety, health, nondiscrimination, and so forth. Assured compliance requires qualified staff at all levels.
For state colleges and universities, the rising costs to students and their families – in the form of tuition and fees, principally – have come about mainly because state legislatures have radically reduced the share of the colleges’ operating costs that comes from the state budget. At my own university, when I was first hired the state provided about 70% of the annual operating budget of my university. Now that’s about 20%! So where can the universities find the funding – while maintaining the quality of its faculty and staff, and complying with all the regulations? (a) increase tuition and fees, (b) cheapen operating costs per student credit hour, through (1) the substitution of temporary staff and adjuncts in place of permanent staff (including tenure-stream professors); and (2) increasing online/distance instruction, wherein students don’t have to come to class on campus, and professors and teaching assistants offer the most minimal help to the students.
Generally speaking, faculty salaries vary by:
- rank: tenured full professors make more than associate professors, who make more than assistant professors. Non-tenure-track lecturers and adjuncts make the least
- type of institution: private research universities pay more than publics, research universities pay more than non-research universities and LACs. Faculty at some elite LACs make more than faculty at many public universities, but generally not as much as at elte private research universities
- location: salaries are generally higher in the Northeast and on the West Coast, though the higher cost of living in those areas may cancel out most of the nominal difference.
- discipline. law, business, and medical school faculty generally make the most. Engineering professors often make more than faculty in the arts and sciences. This may skew the data somewhat because research universities with law, business, medical, and engineering schools will have higher average faculty salaries due in part to a different mix of disciplines.
Just to give you a sense of the range, here are the 2016 AAUP-reported average salaries for full professors at a variety of institutions:
Yale: $216K
Brown $176K
Wellesley $151K
UConn $149K
Wesleyan $149K
Southern Connecticut State U $116K
Northwestern $200K
Michigan $167K
Michigan State $146K
Oberlin $131K
Western Michigan $109K
Kalamazoo College $95K
Vanderbilt $177K
UNC Chapel Hill $152K
Tennessee $137K
Davidson $130K
Appalachian State $97K
Stanford $235K
UC Berkeley $182K
Claremont McKenna $161K
Mills College $112K
San Jose State $104K
@bclintonk The discipline skews the data tremendously between disciplines as well. STEM faculty who can do outside work can make more than humanities faculty who can’t. STEM faculty usually start at higher salaries too, even within the same institution, unless it’s a unionized pay scale.
@ucbalumnus Many staff make equal to or more than faculty. That’s why so many of the young bright faculty where I work are trying to get their EdD in their spare time.
Note that salaries may differ significantly even within one department and same job title.
Also the cited figures are for FULL professors. Very few faculty are full professors. Many never reach that status. So those numbers are really high.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/tenure-is-disappearing-much-to-the-detriment-of-higher-ed/417296/
As many older full professors retire, they are not being replaced. So some of the higher salaries on various charts won’t be budget items in another few years.
Here are some average assistant professor salaries for 2016:
Yale $111K
Brown $93K
Wesleyan $87K
UConn $84K
Southern Connecticut State U $64K
Northwestern $116K
Michigan $90K
Michigan State $79K
Western Michigan $72K
Oberlin $69K
Northern Michigan $63K
Kalamazoo College $58K
Beloit $52K
Data on adjunct salaries are spotty, but at many schools they’re paid a few thousand dollars per class taught, with no benefits. Use of adjuncts varies widely by institution, however; generally the wealthier institutions rely on them less. And the category is a bit of a catch-all. Many adjuncts are full Ph.D.s who would gladly accept a tenure-track position if offered, Others have full-time professional careers outside of academia and teach a class or two for the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, more or less as a hobby. Most law schools, for example, make extensive use of adjuncts, not necessarily as a cost-cutting measure (though there’s some of that), but because they can recruit distinguished practicing lawyers and judges who just enjoy teaching, will do it for a pittance, and often bring a wealth of experiential knowledge and specialized expertise that enriches the curriculum. They’re not paid very much and they get no benefits, but they’re not exactly the kind of academic underclass that most people have in mind when discussing adjuncts. In other disciplines and at many schools, however, adjuncts definitely are an academic underclass.
It’s all over the board. Some profs at UCLA make upwards of 1/4 million a year. Then you’ve got adjunct professors who are barely scraping by with part-time hours and no benefits.
Med School profs can often make over $1Million with salary and practice income.
UC salaries are on line. I think Terrence Tao makes around 450 per year. He probably gets big speaking fees also
How about this…masters degree adjunct (but PhD get the same salary). Teaches six courses a year (3per semester) at a CC. Total salary $13,000 a year. With no benefits whatsoever. None.
I’m not making that up. And in the CC system, they are moving to using more and more adjuncts because clearly, they cost a LOT less than full time faculty.
BTW, when people ask how uni education in Europe could cost less, it’s in part because they get paid even less than the figures shown here (and a reason why many star European profs move to the US).
I don’t know about now but a decade ago, profs would take positions at Oxbridge mostly for the prestige and generally only if their spouse had a well-paying job (in London).
@Chardo, I’m curious: what were you expecting to find re professor salaries? In my experience, the general perception is that we make a lot more than we actually do. Anyone remember Charlie Gibson’s goof at the 2008 Democratic presidential debate? https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/07/image
With our salaries, I and most of my colleagues would never be able to send our children to our institution (without employee benefit) nor to any peer institution. In fact, now that I think about it, the average salary for associate prof is about the COA for one year at our school.
Are your school and its peers not good with FA for students whose parents make about your pay level?
I think comparing the parents’ current salaries with the costs of sending their parents to (a particular) college isn’t that helpful. We need to talk about accumulated savings, both in dedicated college funding plans (such as 529 plans) and in general savings and investments. Only a minority of parents are going to bear the full direct costs of attendance by their children through their immediate income flow each year.
That’s what college savings plans are all about: getting parents to anticipate the costs of college many years in advance. When my kids attended college – with the second one overlapping the first one for one year – there were a couple of years when the total cost of attendance came close to exhausting our disposable income (after taxes). We had to eat, to live. But we squeaked by because we had savings accumulated in particular in the 10 years before the kids reached college age. Some contributions by the grandparents (equivalent to about 1 year’s COA for each child) closed the gap between the total cost of attendance and the amount we could draw from savings plus the amount that we could afford to draw from current income flow.
But were also lucky. Many people close this gap, or stretch the contribution of their earnings to college expenses, by taking loans. Our kids didn’t have to do that for their undergraduate years. We did it our way in part b/c we thought (rightly or wrongly) that the chances of admission to selective colleges would be a bit higher if the kids weren’t asking for financial aid. This was a calculated trade-off on our part.
- I should add that neither of my kids wanted to attend the colleges or universities in our state. The older one was offered quite a lot of scholarship money by two universities but wanted to go out of state. The younger one was only interested in attending stand-alone art colleges.