How much are professors paid? • Hacker News Board

Re: How much are professors paid?

#41

Post by kkylin » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

I'm not sure how meaningful this analysis is. First, as others have noted, just having the word "professor" in the title doesn't mean much: both a full, tenured professor and an untenured, adjunct professor would have the word "professor." (In my field, mathematics, postdoctoral positions are often called "visiting assistant professors"; these are not tenure-track positions.) Second, again as others noted, salary varies widely across fields, e.g., a med school professor will be paid a lot more than an English professor.

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.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#42

Post by rconti » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #2

Something important to note when reading this is that at a university in the US, almost everyone is a professor. That's why these pay ranges are so wide - they include both very junior part-time staff and very senior world-class full-time staff.

That couldn't be less true. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously not "everyone" is a professor when you mix in facilities and administrative staff.

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...

Re: How much are professors paid?

#43

Post by ska » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #29

jedberg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their title is literally "adjunct professor". They would show up in this graph as "professor".

Maybe. In some places, it's "lecturer" or "instructor". In addition, I looked up one individual I know is an adjunct, and his title was just "adjunct" on the department page. I suppose it's possible there's a more official database wherein his title is adjunct professor. 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,…

Adjunct is a way of designating an affiliation that is not on the tenure track, i.e. is not regular faculty (and will not be).

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.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#44

Post by azhenley » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

When I was on the academic job market in 2017/2018, most of the CS faculty positions I was applying to paid between 95-115k as the 9 month salary. So with summary salary from your startup funds/grants it would pay a total salary of 115-140k (assuming 2 months summer salary, which is common).

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.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#45

Post by chirau » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

seancoleman wrote: post #35

I’m an adjunct faculty at ASU and make $4,000/year for one course. This stipend is a nice gesture but I do it for the kids.

What happens if you teach multiple sections of the same course? Like a morning section and an evening section? Do you get paid double or once?

Re: How much are professors paid?

#46

Post by analog31 » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #30

Adjunct/non-tenure faculty should be kept in mind. Depending on the school, somewhere between 40% and 70% is quite typical for instructors that are not paid a salaried wage. Instead, they typically received a certain amount per course taught. 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…

I was an adjunct for one semester, many years ago. I mentioned my experiences to my mom, who is a retired high school teacher. Her response: "Now you know why teachers have a union."

Re: How much are professors paid?

#47

Post by ska » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #30

Adjunct/non-tenure faculty should be kept in mind. Depending on the school, somewhere between 40% and 70% is quite typical for instructors that are not paid a salaried wage. Instead, they typically received a certain amount per course taught. 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…

It's even worse than you paint it, for a lot of adjuncts. Besides the lack of benefits and insurance, often they do not actually know their course allocations in advance, and can suddenly end up losing 1/2 their income or whatever, with a week or so's notice.

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.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#48

Post by tombert » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #39

tombert wrote: post #37

This depresses me a bit. I make substantially more than the average professor, and I'm just an eccentric dropout working at a big megacorporation. 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.

You can do full-time research in your megacorporation on your current salary or higher, probably.

Probably, I work for a tech company, pretty tricky to get that to those positions without a PhD though. Not 100% sure how I'd get a PhD while working full time; after emailing dozens of professors in the NYC area about this, none of them got back to me about that.

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.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#49

Post by kd0amg » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #31

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple 'professor' titles, but only one tenured faculty role. The tenured faculty is the holy grail, and everyone else is underpaid and overworked. [0] 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/…

Could you clarify what 'one tenured faculty role' means? 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 't…

I think GP is using "role" to mean the collection of tasks/functions performed by a person rather than their job title. As far as I can tell, duties and incentives don't change as much when going from associate to full professor as when going from assistant to associate.

Re: How much are professors paid?

#50

Post by throwaway8480 » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

I think the data here are unfortunately pretty hard to interpret, in part because:

- 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.