Wash & Lee professors are well paid in light of the fact that this school has a very tiny research budget of just $227,000. This research budget is so small in comparison to the other LACs noted above that it raises concerns that it might be a misprint.
Smith College’s research budget, for example, is almost $4.5 million, Swarthmore’s is $3.2 million, Amherst’s is $4.26 million, Pomona’s is $3.7 million, Williams’ is $5.75 million & Wellesley’s is at $11.7 million.
Of course, LACs pay profs to teach, not to engage in research, but even Wellesley’s research budget is tiny compared to the listed National Universities’ research budgets which are expressed in hundreds of millions or in billions of dollars.
Numbers can also mislead in that some institutions don’t have medical, law and business schools where prof salaries are typically much higher than those in social sciences and humanities fields.
The Chronicle of Higher Education list of full time professor salaries did not specify whether graduate professional school salaries were included or not. Simply presented the list as 4 year privates. But it would be ridiculous in my opinion to include salaries of professional school professors with those of undergraduate profs. If included, then Northwestern & many other schools on the list would almost certainly surpass Princeton’s salaries as Princeton does not have law, business or medical schools.
It also seems to me for various reasons, Stanford has the pull to attract good profs from many top colleges. I tend to think that weather is one of the tie breakers in both students and profs choosing Stanford over East coast too schools.
I’m inclined to agree with you that weather plays a significant role in attracting students to Stanford, but I’m more inclined to think that prof’s are more attracted by their positions and position-related perks for choosing one over the other rather than the weather. If you Google, you’ll find a plenty of cases of prof’s moving from Stanford for Harvard.
I think Silicon Valley is a big pull for the profs. too. A good portion of the profs my kid had were all involved in the startups or Google, Facebook, etc.
None of which you can find in any other part of the country. A lot of the profs have their own companies or are on the board of some other company.
Sure they pay well, but the cost of housing in the Bay Area is a huge problem for Stanford when it comes to attracting faculty. A salary of 230k doesn’t go very far when median home prices in Santa Clara County are over 1.2M.