Academic family here – Humanities prof spouse – not something you go into for the money. First tenure track job, if you can find one, may be around $50,000. Sounds great, only you are usually close to 30, and haven’t had any real income as a 20 something, because TA stipends barely cover living cheaply. Plus, there are likely to be salary freezes, and even when salaries aren’t frozen, increases are usually between 1-3% a year. The only opportunity for big bumps of about 10% are at tenure decision and possibly making full professor.
^And then there’s me–full-time non-tenure track. Four courses a semester plus service requirements. I only WISH I could ever see 50,000. It’s the contingent faculty-job jackpot because it’s an actual job with benefits, unlike adjuncting, but I get no raises, and have zero job security. More and more academic jobs are looking like this now, sadly.
@garland yes – we are also quite familiar with year to year contract, no benefits, full time during academic year. When faculty are, in theory, the heart of the university – the reason why the students are there in the first place – it is hard to accept that we/they seem to be at the bottom of the list of institutional priorities.
Tenured business school professors at elite schools can make $250K-$500K, I believe. Plus lots of consulting on the side. I don’t know how accurate this article is (seems like the are searching for the highest numbers, but even if you discount a bit, the numbers are pretty high). https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2017/11/06/much-top-business-school-professors-get-paid/
B School and Law School professors are very high, often among the highest faculty salaries at a university. Law professors tend to start at least around $150,000 whereas a Humanities professor may start around $50,000. The assumption is that the Law prof could practice law which would bring in higher salary than the academic salary as a law prof, whereas the Humanities prof often does not have many options using their degree outside the university. (Plenty of Ph.D.s who don’t get tenure track jobs in the first few years do find other careers in business etc., but those are not jobs which are competing for the professor as a young Ph.D.)
I happen to know a couple people who work in the tech transfer office of major research (inc medical) universities. Profs make great idea people, rarely do they make good CEOs or board members. Universities STRIVE to commercialize ideas and product designs. Good programs have internal incubators, idea-athons, etc., where ideas can be vetted and provided early funding.
Faculty, Staff, Employees, and Students are provided the opportunity to submit ideas to these programs. Ultimately, the university and the idea owner can make millions.
UW Madison probably has the first and one of the strongest tech transfer entities of any public U. And tough as nails with good lawyers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Alumni_Research_Foundation
DH is a tenured professor at a med school, but is a PhD not an MD. (They make more.) Believe me, he’s not getting any extra patent money or anything like that. He does not augment his salary with summer pay. He gets maybe one thousand dollars more a year for reading grants or giving seminars. He’s got a small lab doing cancer research. He gets published, but hasn’t been in the really big name journals in a while. He works ALL THE TIME. I’m not going to say what he makes, but our 29 year old son at Google makes twice as much and probably works half as many hours.
Here’s a link to a recent article on salaries at Florida’s public universities (and other state workers):
Florida has 6 public medical schools (UF, FSU, UCF, USF, FIU and FAU), yet the list is dominated by UF faculty. A lot of variation in med school faculty salaries.
The database has much more detail:
I guess it goes without saying that often administration pays better, with less stress (and often don’t require the PhD)…
mackinaw has posted the main comments that I would have made, with a small number items that I would have written about differently:
The main reasons for the cost increase of higher ed in my public research university are reduction in state funding for the university (now a small fraction of the total), increase in administrative staff, and extra facilities for the students. We don’t have a lazy river (!) but we do have much better housing, food, and recreational facilities than we did a generation ago. The increase in administration is substantial. Twenty years ago, we had 2,500 faculty members (give or take) and about 1,000 “administrative-professionals.” Today we have about 2,300 faculty members and about 2,300 “administrative-professionals.” The usual administrative line is that the people are needed to ensure regulatory compliance. This may be true in small part, but I honestly think some of it is due to “empire-building.” More support staff for an administrator = greater apparent importance.
I wish someone needed consulting in quantum mechanics! Maybe they will, before I retire. Nanomachines are headed in that direction.
My university has an overhead rate in the mid 50% range. This is among the lower negotiated overhead rates. What this means is that when I get a federal research grant, a little over 1/3 of it goes into the administration, and I don’t see that money. I have to support my grad students and post-doc on the remainder (+ 1 month of my summer salary, see the next paragraph).
To date, I have only had “serious” money from the National Science Foundation. In the entire program that provides my grants, faculty are limited to 1 month of summer salary. I work for 2 months in the summer for free. I have essentially never taken more than 5 days off during the period when I am unpaid.
Working all the time winds up being just about essential (with maybe 15 minutes a day off for reading/posting on CC). I have been tenured for many years. In the past two weeks, I have worked past 2 am on two days, past 1 am the majority of the days, and past 11:30 essentially every day. There are a large number of demands on my time, all of which have to be met. I usually get home around 7 or 7:30. We eat out a lot.
(Added as a postscript: True, it is near the end of the semester and I had a grant deadline, but it is not as if I don’t usually work until midnight or so.)
@QuantMech. You are describing what my work life was like before retirement. I’m a social scientist, who worked mainly in political science but also sociology and demography. I held administrative posts for several years (chair, program director) but even then my main day-to-day concerns were my research and teaching.
I paid for much of my research, some curriculum development, and almost all of my international travel with grants from NSF, NIH, NEH, and private foundations. I had more or less continuous external funding for 30 years in my career. One payoff to me: I got an annualized (11-month) salary most of my working years. Another payoff: I got raises. I also got to know the cleaning crew because I worked very long hours, often 60+ per week. (One of those people used to bring me home-made tamales as a snack in the middle of the night in my office). My son sometimes mocked me when I would say soto voce, “not enough time, too much to do.” (Now I think he has the same nocturnal work habits!)
As you know, the life of a university professor/researcher has its rewards. But it’s not a vacation.
I used to work in an administrative position in IT at a university. I do not have a PhD, and my annual salary was higher than some of the assistant professors. I worked 12 months a year, and their contract (at my university) was for 9 months.
I would NOT say that my job was less stressful. I was on call 24/7, worked late almost every day of the week, and worked on weekends. I, too, got to know the late-night cleaning crew (and @mackinaw we had one who made wonderful tamales as well, although he sold them as a fund-raiser for a relative with health-care costs).
However, I loved my job, and loved the environment. For the most part, I worked with hard-working, intelligent, and committed individuals who poured their knowledge and talent into making the best educational environment possible for the students at the university.
I, and a lot of my PhD student friends, are trending away from academia because of several of the issues raised in this thread. The pay isn’t great. Lecturers at UMich are barely making more than grad students (yes, I realize there’s a difference between lecturer and professor but jobs are trending away from professors).
I love my field and I love my department. I don’t think I want to become a professor anymore. This summer, I’m doing a fellowship through the U but that involves doing community work rather than research & more “academic” work. I think after I graduate, I want more of a community-oriented position rather than an ivory tower one.
I don’t like the politics of academia. Getting sick with a serious, lifelong illness has put a lot of things in perspective. I don’t want to work 70 hour weeks with a family. I’d be sick and busy all the time. I don’t want that life. I have zero regrets about going for my phd though even if I end up in a position that ends up using my MPH rather than PhD.
Today there are threads on how kiddos can’t understand their foreign TA’s accent – in another 15 years, there will be threads on CC how kiddos can’t understand their PROFESSORS’ poor English. Both for the same reasons: Americans not going into academia because they can make more outside of it.
The business profs at Wharton make excellent salaries. And they consult and write books to supplement this income.
The post by katliamom is the beginning of a real problem in STEM fields, outside the very top schools, and even there in some cases.
In engineering, professors are often able to earn 50%+ of their teaching salary by consulting.
A generation or two ago, plenty of professors had come to America from foreign countries, perhaps from Europe after World War II. Many spoke English with an accent. In international studies, consider Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as highly notable examples. I think college students can adapt to professors who have accents. The colleges are trying to hire the most promising teacher-scholars as faculty members.
But there is a problem with teaching assistants, who haven’t necessarily lived in the U.S. or other English-speaking countries for very long. At my university, international TA’s had to pass a “speak-test” in English. If they couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t be assigned to teach in the classroom (though they might work as research assistants). TOEFL scores were generally unreliable (in part because of cheating in the home country). International students sometimes had to undergo special language training after they arrived on campus. Students who came from countries in which there was more exposure to English (perhaps from countries that had been colonies of Great Britain) generally were better speakers of English, and perhaps had developed command of colloquial spoken English from English-language media.
A few points:
a) Many administrative staff work hard and make a great contribution to the university. The big difference, compared to faculty, is that they are not recruited globally and they don’t spend their lives being judged or compared with the best in the world.
b) A nightmare lifestyle, to me, would be the US medical school idea of hiring non-tenure research faculty (nice professor title) at ZERO salary. Raise ALL your salary EVERY year from outside grants, or you get kicked out.
c) Faculty with accents/ incomprehensible faculty is not a new problem. I was at UC Davis several decades ago, and a few faculty, who I could understand perfectly well, were getting very harsh teaching evaluations from American students who really were not very tolerant on the issue. As there are now more Chinese faculty in the US, and fluent spoken English is harder coming from Chinese language than from say Dutch, the problem may be more noticeable these days.
d) Public university salaries are public, as mentioned above in this thread, and I snoop at UC Davis salaries from time to time - I am utterly shocked at the lack of salary progression for very successful faculty over as much as 30 years.
e) If you want a good (or very good) salary and much less struggle to get funding for equipment, students, etc. - then quit your US position and come to China… a LOT of hiring at a very wide range of universities these days. And not just STEM any longer. You don’t even have to learn the host country language…