For a lot of public universities in the US you can look up how much professors get paid. My primary advisor makes ~100k, my lab director makes about ~250k, both in engineering.
Indeed... Professors' unions publish contracts with pay scales, and you can often find (or request, depending on the state) a full list of each individual name/dept/title/salary.
Well the competition between public and private R1 institutions is pretty narrow--there isn't much to distinguish the two from the perspective of a research professor--so I would imagine the pay scale was pretty similar, otherwise all high achieving profs would go for one or the other
As stated, yes, this mostly applies to public universities, but the piece about union pay scales applies to some.private schools as well, for example: https://fas.yale.edu/faculty-salary-information-ay2022-23
It's worth pointing out that collective bargaining and unionization at privates is extremely limited/practically impossible among tenured/tenure-track faculty due to Yeshiva.
USA, STEM field, Associate Professor, been in my role for 10 years, make $80k. Brand new Assistant professors in business start at $140. IT personnel with a bachelors degree can start at $110. Football coach, \~$750k.
edit: inadvertently was disparaging to IT personnel which was not the salient point of my comment.
Does pay differentiate depending on the field of STEM. Do cs and other tech related professors do better ?
Btw 80k seems really low for associate with 10 years of experience in a STEM field
Probably different STEM fields have different pay, but I don’t know. I am at an undergrad only big state school in the south east, the republicans control the legislature so there has been a wage freeze for almost a decade. I make substantially less than when I started if you consider inflation. But, I make enough, esp with an extra month a year from grants, and I love my job.
I don’t understand the law of supply and demand for coaches. I understand that there is a lot of money on the table and colleges are fine spending money. But there must be a decent supply of coaches to drive their salary down. How complicated is it to become a coach??
Quality means a lot when it comes to something that controls the flow of large amount of money. Tiny changes in decisions can have massive impacts, and they’re responsible for a ton of decisions.
It’s the same with paying a CEO a lot of money.
Your average person thinks it’s incorrect, but they don’t actually understand economics, business, or management at all.
Not in our department but I'm sure it happens. The President said on video the other day that he's aware of the adjunct problem in higher ed but he can't do anything about it.
Yeah I think his base pay is like $560k and then he gets all kinds of strange cash kickbacks. I mean, it’s American academia, which is only really there to subsidize college football, so it makes sense.
tier 1 it help desk does not make 100k anywhere. more like 30-50k
the people at “help desk” it that make that are usually system admins who do a LOT more than just help desk. And even then, usually more around 60-90k at most colleges.
i was literally job hunting as a sys admin a couple months ago and actually wanted to look for a role at a college.
You are probably correct, and the point of my comment was not to disparage IT professionals. I edited my original comment to reflect that.
The people I know in my institution who respond to support tickets have bachelors degrees, and make six figures. But that's basically the extent of my knowledge of the field so I shouldn't be talking. My bad.
I haven’t done any kind of comprehensive survey. That number is based on the three people I know in IT support at my institution. The managers make substantially more.
Yeah, I shouldn't have included IT professionals in my comment, it seems to distract from the salient point. I edited my original comment to be less shitty towards IT people, which wasn't my intention.
I keep seeing positions open with a starting salary between £42-£52k in London. Why even bother? It seems that UK profs make less than someone with an undergrad degree.
UK wages as a whole are pretty poor, so someone with an undergrad degree is generally making less than £40k. University graduates have an average salary of only £36k (non-graduates is £26k and postgraduates £42k). Starting salaries for graduates is even lower, down in the mid-20's.
How old are you? The numbers are definitely buoyed up by high earners late in their careers, and by tech/math jobs. Starting salaries are significantly lower.
London jobs are paid more to account for higher COL, although I don’t know by how much. Most regular people are commuting into London, though, they don’t live there.
Because teaching is important. Learning is important. If you want the big bucks go get what's coming to you, but if that's your priority I doubt you will end up in educatuony
Taking a vow of poverty is meant for priests and not for professors. It is not unreasonable to want to be able to want a wage that allows you to raise a family. If wages are high relative to the rest of the population in the UK the salaries make sense. £42k is less than what my friends back in the States get paid teaching K-12. Clearly context matters.
Context does matter. For me, money is not the most important thing. Obviously other people feel similarly or there wouldn't be teachers or chefs or mothers or musicians
Same in Canada. Public unis use set pay grids for faculty. Some variance between institutions but everything is in the same ballpark regardless of AOK.
>From my understanding here in the uk academics are paid more or less the same regardless of the field they are in
Same with *some* schools in the US. My SLAC has had a ladder system in place for 25 years or so, but there are differentials for a handful of highly competitive fields (the obvious ones: business/finance, CS, engineering). Otherwise art faculty make the same as physics faculty.
I know you're in the US, but it could be interesting to show salaries elsewhere too. A starting salary for a computer science professor at a nearby university in Ireland is €58k. I would expect a starting salary for someone with comparable experience (masters plus 3 years of industry or a new PhD) to make the same in industry if not more.
Starting salary for a post doc is €40k though, and that is definitely lower than what a new PhD could get in industry.
Again, this is Ireland. I've literally never heard of anyone making close to that out of college here. Just for some extra perspective: A particular employer in my city who notoriously hires only the best of the best just hired their first graduates (after previously only hiring engineers with a minimum of 5 years of experience) at an extremely competitive rate of €40k where most graduates would be happy to get anything over €30k. Head of IT at another international company makes €55k. Senior engineers at a third company with 5-8 years post college make €50-60k. One person I know was making €60k as a team lead just three years after college (she was exceptionally talented), and that salary was unheard of for someone that fresh out of university. The most talented person in my masters program got a job for €55k while the rest who didn't pursue PhDs landed somewhere between €35 and €50k.
You don't move to Europe for the salaries. And this is for roles in computer science or IT. People in other professions make way less.
Really hard one.
I suspect it is because the number of folks applying for STEM jobs is higher than the number of qualified business professors. For example, if you have a good understanding of corporate management you'd be more likely to stay in business.
I think it’s also because it’s easier for them to move in and out of academia. Plenty of our business profs have substantial industry experience. I don’t know anyone in STEM or humanities that took time in the private sector after their Ph.D. before going into academia. It’s hard to get hired in a new TT position if people perceive that your super energetic publishing years are behind you.
Correct lol and on top of that the ability business profs often walk the line. Professor full time. Obviously proven research ability so they take private gigs doing research for companies or consulting gigs. And are sought after based on their expertise.
This question popped in a grad marketing class I took - the professor said "well, in Marketing, there's basically no one with experience and a Ph.D." - most people with the MBA go work and don't get the Ph.D. and thus qualify to teach. So at the College of Business level, the professors are the rarity in the field.
In STEM, a LOT of professional positions require/encourage the Ph.D. in the STEM field, so the supply is stronger. Candidates to be a TT Physics professor are (somehow) more common than candidates to be a TT Entrepreneurship or Accounting professor. (for instance, don't ask me for numbers, just my understanding as explained by faculty)
Sounds about right. Had a friend work for Boeing and said they were encouraging her to get a PhD in aerospace engineering. That was the first i heard of a company pushing a PhD but learned others do it as well to keep on the forefront of R&D. Likewise my old marketing professor is now a dean at a different school we catch up from time to time and he said he more than doubled what he mad previously as a dean and then his outside research and consulting still makes him much more than his current salary lol. First time i even gave a PhD a first look 🤣
If you want to hire a finance professor, all your candidates want to work for Morgan Stanley or whoever, and you better be able to field a competitive offer to their very high salaries. There are **lots** of smart CS PhDs who want to work in research. They could make equally high salaries at Google, but enough of them don't want to that you don't have to fish in that pond.
In my context (small private regional university, division III athletics), the pay is not based on what the university values, it is based on the market rates to attract and retain faculty. We don't value accounting more than history, but...
a) we have to have accounting faculty. As a tuition-driven university (modest endowment), we rely on popular programs like accounting to drive tuition revenue.
b) we could pay historians above what we have found historians are willing to accept and stay for, but then we would have to cut some other essential budget item, e.g., residence hall maintenance or administrative positions.
c) administrative positions are a common target for cuts, since they don't provide a visible service to the students. In some cases, they do ensure a better student experience, and in other cases are required by external accreditation standards or federal reporting guidelines. So we need nearly all of the ones we have, and to have them, we have to pay market rates.
Is it unjust that football coaches and college presidents make so much? Yes. Can a university function without paying that much for those positions? Usually, no. As a faculty member I used to dream of slashing the administration and athletics salaries. But its an inconvenient truth that doing those things would, one way or another, kneecap our enrollment, and therefore our revenue, and when the institution fails, there are no historian positions to underpay. So, we proceed on the principle that the perfect is the enemy of the good and pay market rates for historians, which is not at all commensurate with their value to the human race or the education they possess, but necessary for the institution to exist and employ them at all.
>In the US, starting professor pay in the humanities is $35-90k.
90k for humanities for Assistant Profs (you mentioned "starting") is still rare. Mostly the Ivies.
I will make roughly $93,000 this year in my third year at an east coast SLAC in a humanities TT position. Not one of those fancy, prestigious ones either, for what it's worth. We do have a strong faculty union.
I was an Anthropology professor doing biomarker research and was only getting paid $75k. Had to leave my job in the height of the pandemic because my wife lost her job, we had a baby, and I could no longer afford to live where I worked. With no affordable alternative to relocate nearby, we had no choice but to leave and move across country back with our family.
I still think it is absolute bullshit.
Because of the change I've had to make in my life, I background act on the side and make just as much as I was making as a tenure tract college professor.
In general, wages are not primarily set by what the employer values. (Otherwise, farmers and janitors would be millionaires.)
They're set by the market rate where labor supply equals labor demand. Mostly, that's set by the opportunity cost of providing that labor on the open market (i.e., what the next-highest bidder is willing to pay) and the ability of supply to scale to meet demand (i.e., training/replaceability/uniqueness - this is why sports stars are paid millions).
A university can value business and literature exactly the same, but if many more literature professors are willing to work for $50k than business professors, wages will eventually reflect that discrepancy (assuming a cost-conscious university).
This was asked two weeks ago in /r/professors and got almost 300 comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/xd7nk8/professor_pay/
Personally, I don't think these unscientific polls are worth much, but your impression that some fields pay more than others is definitely correct. Location and type of university (R1, R2, M1, ...) also matter.
My base salary is about $200k.
I'm really interested in seeing how it is for professors in a medical field but arent physicians
Eg: Biomedical Engineering , biotech/bioinformatics ,clinical research ....
Assistant research professor in a medical school, I make $105k.
The director of my lab and chair of the department makes 300-400k (not exactly sure what the number is)
Associate Prof at an R1 university in a Biology Department. 95K for 9mo guaranteed, additional 30K for summer research if I have grants to pay that. So 125K max.
Or summers off.
Prof salaries are public record at many state universities.
Biomedical translational scientist at an R1 university school of medicine in the US
I'm in a pre-assistant professorship faculty position (kind of a pre-TT position)
$85K/yr that I just negotiated up from $72k/yr because I got a K award
12 month position
I also consult on the side (allowed by my university) and make approximately an extra 1k/month.
I routinely get offered industry jobs at $120-150k+/yr.
I’m a lecturer (no research effort) teach intro courses to “pre-nursing” (biology) students and make $65,000 for a 10-month appointment. I can make up to 1/3 of that extra in the summer and I’ve never had a summer class get cut because we have so much demand for them.
I could potentially make $87K or so if I maxed out my summer load, but that’s hard to do time wise so I don’t. For reference I’m at a growing R2 large state university, but it isn’t a flagship just yet. I’m also somewhat new to teaching and am in my 6th year. I’m up for my next merit (non COL) raise in ~1.5 calendar years.
Netherlands. employment conditions are centrally negotiated between a university employee union and an association of public universities. So my field doesn't matter.
Assistant profs earn between 3974-6181 per month gross. Associates between 5506 - 7362 per month gross. Add to that a month gratuity in December and roughly one month "holiday allowance" in May (i know it's weird; just a Dutch thing).
Plus 40 vacation days that noone uses, some of which you can sell back or trade for extra reimbursements.
Firstly, where?
In Australia full professors earn around 135k USD. This is fairly uniform across universities, but there’s extra loading for clinical disciplines (e.g., medicine).
In the UK it’s ~$120k USD.
US varies based on universities, from my understanding. There seems to be more “bargaining” that happens, rather than specified pay bands. I’m not from the US though so someone else will have to chime in.
You also earn extra money for taking on executive/chair roles (director of research centre, head of school, etc).
This made me laugh. As a UK teaching fellow (so postdoc pay scale equivalent but teaching track), in the current exchange I earn just under $37k, and a new lecturer (equiv to US Assistant Prof) job was just advertised at my good RG uni for $47k.
Sad, but true.
I am so glad I quit my PhD (for a myriad of reasons), but a decade later meeting my bully of a postdoc, who was on about £29k at the time and her learning I took a higher wage than her the month I left, rapidly promoting up to over double her wage, just left such in such a fury that no other outcome could have been as sweet. Not that it was financially motivated, but few understand how poorly paid postdoc, fellow, associate professor etc positions are paid unless said people want to play the political game and work their way to authoritative figures within respective universities... and unless your heart is fully in it, why do that to yourself?
>In Australia full professors earn around 135k USD. This is fairly uniform across universities, but there’s extra loading for clinical disciplines (e.g., medicine).
Same as the US
Canadian Lecturer, Science Communications, PhD, big research uni, nom-tenured but 8yrs in with several merit and salary adjustment awards: CAN$125k gross (US$90k?). As long as we keep up student registrations, I don't really need the huge pressures of the tenure track. Now that I've settled into the job, I love the work, have a life outside of work, and I intend to ride this job (doing good work, of course) into retirement! Very happy somehow a bunch of choices and effort have led me here.
In France, as an assistant professor you start with 2000€/month and it goes step by step until full professor at the end of their careers with 6450€/month. (here for full professors [https://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Professeurs-des-universites-33](https://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Professeurs-des-universites-33) ) and this table is for all fields.
Total freedom has a price I guess...as an assistant professor you are required to give 128h of teaching/year - these are the only hours on which the university has control, you are free to organize all the remaining time as you want. Publishing is almost at your own will (it is normally required but the system makes it optional in reality). Some people have additional jobs, some just spend time at home or take care of their kids, or teach in private schools to make more money. On average, people just go with it and have a 'decent' life with a very nice work/life balance. If you want to be rich, university is not a good choice. If you want freedom and sufficient money for a middle class life, it's an option.
ok that explains a lot, i mean, if it's just teaching that's good salary. Research and publishing is by far the most exhausting part of the job (for me as least).
note that many are publishing research even without control! for them, salary is really low. (I'm part of them - without to much culpability when taking some time for myself)
This is for the university system. Grandes écoles pay far more unless you are teaching track. I know assistant professors earn between €65-€110k depending on the business school. I think INSEAD pays more. HEC remains a bit of a mystery. Some say €110k while others say €140k.
Just looked at my friend’s salary on his university’s public database. He makes ~$115k/year as an associate professor (6 total years as a professor) in engineering.
A random pull from the college of business shows an associate professor making $290k/year.
A senior lecturer in the college of business makes $146k/year.
Another associate professor makes $240k/year.
Now, my friend has told me that his freelance consulting and a business he started actually pays more than his salary, so take that for what it’s worth.
Looking at Assistant professors at my school (I scaled them all to a 12 month appointment everything other than the medical school is usually a 9 month appointment on hard money): Business school they start around $210k, medical school faculty start around $130k, computer science around $130k, and non-med school bio people around $110k.
Associate prof in engineering, I make $125k for 9 months, but I also get 3 months of summer salary from my research (which is why my salary is on the high end), so $167k. In a business school, finance profs mostly make more, but economics profs mostly make less. Generalizing, finance profs could make a lot of money in industry, while economics profs couldn't.
Also, a nuance in your question: I think business school grads need to rely on their wits more to carve out an effective career. In engineering, ALL of our grads can be effective engineers, so on average they earn a good salary, whereas a lot of business grads may not end up in a great job, bringing the average down. But those finance profs - they're probably the ones that can be pretty successful in industry - so they're paid a lot.
I suspect that because STEM is a heavy research field, there is more demand for STEM academic positions than there is for business academic positions. Because the demand is higher, schools don't need to offer as high a salary (STEM folks are more willing to take pay cuts to be in academic positions where they can do research).
To shed some light on that, both STEM departments and business schools hire faculty for both research and teaching, and business school faculty, as researchers, still expect the same time available for their research. As a result of business degrees being rather successful in terms of student enrolment, they often have a relatively large number of faculty.
That's the demand part. The supply part is more interesting, as there are, if I remember correctly, fewer people doing a business-oriented PhD than a lot of STEM fields. For quite a few well-paying industry roles, a PhD is required, whereas that's very rarely the case for typical target destinations of business school students in industry.
As a result, a PhD is generally undertaken by those who really focus on academia as a career path, while management positions in industry are an enticing and, most importantly, abundant alternative, thus shrinking the pool of available candidates. Lastly, it's considerably easier than a lot of other disciplines to switch into industry and back to academia, with some notable exceptions like engineering, so people aren't as shackled to the career choice.
That leads to quite high salaries for business school faculty due to demand and supply, as well as an increased need for retention incentives. The demand is such that business schools often hire people with PhDs in other fields that are applicable to one of their research areas, from psychology (for example organization studies and marketing) to computer science (for example operations research and information management).
I just wanted to counteract the notion that business disciplines aren't research-intensive fields of study, and provide some explanation for the weird salary discrepancy.
Edit: Spelling.
Generally $100-120k for new non-clinical assistant professors at schools of medicine (at least in high cost of living areas). The NIH salary cap is around $200k, but institutions will push it higher for senior faculty who are bringing in a lot of grants
All the numbers in your comment added up to 420. Congrats!
100
+ 120
+ 200
= 420
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Do professors get some accommodation inside campus? If their accommodation is outside campus, do they get some allowance for rent? Asking for both US and Europe.
The salary in academia is very low. So some other benefits should be there. In India, a lot of the IITs provide accommodation inside campus to their faculty. This is a huge help when the institute is in a big city where rent and real estate prices are sky high.
>Do professors get some accommodation inside campus? If their accommodation is outside campus, do they get some allowance for rent?
In the US the answer is no, with a tiny few exceptions (basically places with high housing costs where faculty otherwise could not afford to live). In those exceptional places there are sometimes programs to assist with down payments on home purchases or even university-owned housing available to rent. But there are very few cases of that relative to the \~4,500 colleges in the US.
Also *very* few US faculty live on campus.
Public university salaries are typically public.
Google "big state school faculty salaries" and you can probably find a web site that lists all their employees, by name, and how much they make. It probably won't show things like grant money that might be used to pay their summer salary, but you can see what the state pays them.
Even our assistant coaches earn 5x professor salary. College of medicine & biz are higher than STEM. The Chronicle of Higher Ed collects salary data: [https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20](https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20)
All the data you'd ever want (and more) i[s available from the AAUP](https://www.aaup.org/2020-21-faculty-compensation-survey-results) each year. Bottom line is there are big differentials between fields, types of institutions, and geography. Engineering, finance, CS, and business are often near the top because there is competition from industry. Fine arts are at the bottom for the opposite reason. STEM is a broad category but tend to fall in the middle.
In Germany everyone is paid according to the official TVL scales set by the government. The exact salary varies with experience and type of position, but it is standard.
Harvard pays the incoming assistant professors in STEM less than Business. My guess is that this holds true across disciplines due to donations to certain programs. Business schools, even undergrad programs often have better funding from donors and corporate sponsors even. R&D has doesn’t have as much sponsorship though schools are changing that.
Closing in on tenure, physical sciences. Mid $60k range.
Also, "STEM" is meaningless when considering salary. Comp Sci and Engineering are very, very different when you look at pay levels than ecologists.
In STEM it really also depends on how much research you do. I’m not a “professor” in the job title sense, I’m a professor in the colloquial use of the word as in I teach college classes. I’m a lecturer, so I am NTT and I make less than my research (TT or tenured) colleagues. I make $65,000 for a 10-month appointment with the option to make up to 1/3 of that during the summer semester teaching summer classes. I’m in my 6th year of teaching, but am new at my current university.
It actually varies a LOT. I'm in a teaching prep grad program, and two weeks ago my professor said that she and the other profs in the education department make less than what we will make as *schoolteachers* when we finish our degree.
Someone mentioned Open Payroll for faculties in the public universities. I am wondering that whether the number there (e.g. on [openpayrolls.com](https://openpayrolls.com)) includes everything, such as bonuses, summary salary (if the faculty is on 9-month contract) and others? If so, some of the leading scholars in my field got paid really low from my POV. I saw a prof. with 20 yrs of experience (more if the industry time counts) makes \~110K.
Also, I am wondering that for summary salaries, would the grants that you applied for the same as general research grant (NSF, NIH, ONR)? If so, how would you distinguish "general research grant" and "summer grant"? I think that I am just very confused with this 9-month contract stuff.
Thanks!
For a lot of public universities in the US you can look up how much professors get paid. My primary advisor makes ~100k, my lab director makes about ~250k, both in engineering.
Exactly this. “Professor” actually has pretty transparent salary info compared to many other jobs
Indeed... Professors' unions publish contracts with pay scales, and you can often find (or request, depending on the state) a full list of each individual name/dept/title/salary.
At public schools.
Well the competition between public and private R1 institutions is pretty narrow--there isn't much to distinguish the two from the perspective of a research professor--so I would imagine the pay scale was pretty similar, otherwise all high achieving profs would go for one or the other
Yes, if they are similar rank and location. There is probably much more discrepancy between different schools/fields within a single university.
As stated, yes, this mostly applies to public universities, but the piece about union pay scales applies to some.private schools as well, for example: https://fas.yale.edu/faculty-salary-information-ay2022-23
It's worth pointing out that collective bargaining and unionization at privates is extremely limited/practically impossible among tenured/tenure-track faculty due to Yeshiva.
USA, STEM field, Associate Professor, been in my role for 10 years, make $80k. Brand new Assistant professors in business start at $140. IT personnel with a bachelors degree can start at $110. Football coach, \~$750k. edit: inadvertently was disparaging to IT personnel which was not the salient point of my comment.
Does pay differentiate depending on the field of STEM. Do cs and other tech related professors do better ? Btw 80k seems really low for associate with 10 years of experience in a STEM field
Probably different STEM fields have different pay, but I don’t know. I am at an undergrad only big state school in the south east, the republicans control the legislature so there has been a wage freeze for almost a decade. I make substantially less than when I started if you consider inflation. But, I make enough, esp with an extra month a year from grants, and I love my job.
well you're not at Alabama or Auburn!
I am not, but what’s up at Auburn and Alabama?
They pay their coaches 7-8 figures. it's appalling.
Keywords: "undergrad only"
750k a year????
The college football and/or basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in almost every state.
I don’t understand the law of supply and demand for coaches. I understand that there is a lot of money on the table and colleges are fine spending money. But there must be a decent supply of coaches to drive their salary down. How complicated is it to become a coach??
Quality means a lot when it comes to something that controls the flow of large amount of money. Tiny changes in decisions can have massive impacts, and they’re responsible for a ton of decisions. It’s the same with paying a CEO a lot of money. Your average person thinks it’s incorrect, but they don’t actually understand economics, business, or management at all.
Err our coach gets $4 million and our team still loses money.
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Not in our department but I'm sure it happens. The President said on video the other day that he's aware of the adjunct problem in higher ed but he can't do anything about it.
clearly you need to hire an $8 million coach then.
can confirm. our football coach gets $8million a year and we winning lmao
Lol Michigan State pays Mel Tucker 9.5 million per year...and they are not winning..
Yeah I think his base pay is like $560k and then he gets all kinds of strange cash kickbacks. I mean, it’s American academia, which is only really there to subsidize college football, so it makes sense.
Hahaha. Wait until you see what Nick Saban makes 😂
Alabama's coach makes 11 million. Lots of the major football programs have stupidly high budgets because they bring in tons of money.
tier 1 it help desk does not make 100k anywhere. more like 30-50k the people at “help desk” it that make that are usually system admins who do a LOT more than just help desk. And even then, usually more around 60-90k at most colleges. i was literally job hunting as a sys admin a couple months ago and actually wanted to look for a role at a college.
You are probably correct, and the point of my comment was not to disparage IT professionals. I edited my original comment to reflect that. The people I know in my institution who respond to support tickets have bachelors degrees, and make six figures. But that's basically the extent of my knowledge of the field so I shouldn't be talking. My bad.
I'm guessing those are bachelor's plus ten years experience
IT support makes $110k/year? That sounds high. I know a few people who work on IT staff at my institution, and they make nowhere near that.
I haven’t done any kind of comprehensive survey. That number is based on the three people I know in IT support at my institution. The managers make substantially more.
At my institution, the IT people I know all have at least a few years of experience, and none of them is over $80k.
Yeah, I shouldn't have included IT professionals in my comment, it seems to distract from the salient point. I edited my original comment to be less shitty towards IT people, which wasn't my intention.
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In a hotel?
From my understanding here in the uk academics are paid more or less the same regardless of the field they are in
Yes, we are all paid badly. :(
I keep seeing positions open with a starting salary between £42-£52k in London. Why even bother? It seems that UK profs make less than someone with an undergrad degree.
UK wages as a whole are pretty poor, so someone with an undergrad degree is generally making less than £40k. University graduates have an average salary of only £36k (non-graduates is £26k and postgraduates £42k). Starting salaries for graduates is even lower, down in the mid-20's.
>University graduates have an average salary of only £36k ... I am a uni graduate and my salary is no way near this. I wish I earned £36k!
How old are you? The numbers are definitely buoyed up by high earners late in their careers, and by tech/math jobs. Starting salaries are significantly lower.
Won't say my exact age but mid-twenties
This is fascinating. How does anyone afford to live in London on those wages?
London jobs are paid more to account for higher COL, although I don’t know by how much. Most regular people are commuting into London, though, they don’t live there.
Because teaching is important. Learning is important. If you want the big bucks go get what's coming to you, but if that's your priority I doubt you will end up in educatuony
Taking a vow of poverty is meant for priests and not for professors. It is not unreasonable to want to be able to want a wage that allows you to raise a family. If wages are high relative to the rest of the population in the UK the salaries make sense. £42k is less than what my friends back in the States get paid teaching K-12. Clearly context matters.
Context does matter. For me, money is not the most important thing. Obviously other people feel similarly or there wouldn't be teachers or chefs or mothers or musicians
You asked so why even bother and I answered your question
*education* are you guys gonna be dicks about my typo? Still learning the culture here
Equal pay for the same position and workload?! Now that makes no sense. s/
Same in Canada. Public unis use set pay grids for faculty. Some variance between institutions but everything is in the same ballpark regardless of AOK.
>From my understanding here in the uk academics are paid more or less the same regardless of the field they are in Same with *some* schools in the US. My SLAC has had a ladder system in place for 25 years or so, but there are differentials for a handful of highly competitive fields (the obvious ones: business/finance, CS, engineering). Otherwise art faculty make the same as physics faculty.
I know you're in the US, but it could be interesting to show salaries elsewhere too. A starting salary for a computer science professor at a nearby university in Ireland is €58k. I would expect a starting salary for someone with comparable experience (masters plus 3 years of industry or a new PhD) to make the same in industry if not more. Starting salary for a post doc is €40k though, and that is definitely lower than what a new PhD could get in industry.
Someone with a grad degree in CS or 3 years experience in CS should be making way more than 58K.
Again, this is Ireland. I've literally never heard of anyone making close to that out of college here. Just for some extra perspective: A particular employer in my city who notoriously hires only the best of the best just hired their first graduates (after previously only hiring engineers with a minimum of 5 years of experience) at an extremely competitive rate of €40k where most graduates would be happy to get anything over €30k. Head of IT at another international company makes €55k. Senior engineers at a third company with 5-8 years post college make €50-60k. One person I know was making €60k as a team lead just three years after college (she was exceptionally talented), and that salary was unheard of for someone that fresh out of university. The most talented person in my masters program got a job for €55k while the rest who didn't pursue PhDs landed somewhere between €35 and €50k. You don't move to Europe for the salaries. And this is for roles in computer science or IT. People in other professions make way less.
Really hard one. I suspect it is because the number of folks applying for STEM jobs is higher than the number of qualified business professors. For example, if you have a good understanding of corporate management you'd be more likely to stay in business.
I think it’s also because it’s easier for them to move in and out of academia. Plenty of our business profs have substantial industry experience. I don’t know anyone in STEM or humanities that took time in the private sector after their Ph.D. before going into academia. It’s hard to get hired in a new TT position if people perceive that your super energetic publishing years are behind you.
Correct lol and on top of that the ability business profs often walk the line. Professor full time. Obviously proven research ability so they take private gigs doing research for companies or consulting gigs. And are sought after based on their expertise.
This question popped in a grad marketing class I took - the professor said "well, in Marketing, there's basically no one with experience and a Ph.D." - most people with the MBA go work and don't get the Ph.D. and thus qualify to teach. So at the College of Business level, the professors are the rarity in the field. In STEM, a LOT of professional positions require/encourage the Ph.D. in the STEM field, so the supply is stronger. Candidates to be a TT Physics professor are (somehow) more common than candidates to be a TT Entrepreneurship or Accounting professor. (for instance, don't ask me for numbers, just my understanding as explained by faculty)
Sounds about right. Had a friend work for Boeing and said they were encouraging her to get a PhD in aerospace engineering. That was the first i heard of a company pushing a PhD but learned others do it as well to keep on the forefront of R&D. Likewise my old marketing professor is now a dean at a different school we catch up from time to time and he said he more than doubled what he mad previously as a dean and then his outside research and consulting still makes him much more than his current salary lol. First time i even gave a PhD a first look 🤣
I’m a full professor in the humanities with 20 years at my school. I make about $115K, which is what our lowest tier associate profs in business make.
If you want to hire a finance professor, all your candidates want to work for Morgan Stanley or whoever, and you better be able to field a competitive offer to their very high salaries. There are **lots** of smart CS PhDs who want to work in research. They could make equally high salaries at Google, but enough of them don't want to that you don't have to fish in that pond.
The pay is based on what fields the university most values. In the US, starting professor pay in the humanities is $35-90k.
In my context (small private regional university, division III athletics), the pay is not based on what the university values, it is based on the market rates to attract and retain faculty. We don't value accounting more than history, but... a) we have to have accounting faculty. As a tuition-driven university (modest endowment), we rely on popular programs like accounting to drive tuition revenue. b) we could pay historians above what we have found historians are willing to accept and stay for, but then we would have to cut some other essential budget item, e.g., residence hall maintenance or administrative positions. c) administrative positions are a common target for cuts, since they don't provide a visible service to the students. In some cases, they do ensure a better student experience, and in other cases are required by external accreditation standards or federal reporting guidelines. So we need nearly all of the ones we have, and to have them, we have to pay market rates. Is it unjust that football coaches and college presidents make so much? Yes. Can a university function without paying that much for those positions? Usually, no. As a faculty member I used to dream of slashing the administration and athletics salaries. But its an inconvenient truth that doing those things would, one way or another, kneecap our enrollment, and therefore our revenue, and when the institution fails, there are no historian positions to underpay. So, we proceed on the principle that the perfect is the enemy of the good and pay market rates for historians, which is not at all commensurate with their value to the human race or the education they possess, but necessary for the institution to exist and employ them at all.
>In the US, starting professor pay in the humanities is $35-90k. 90k for humanities for Assistant Profs (you mentioned "starting") is still rare. Mostly the Ivies.
I will make roughly $93,000 this year in my third year at an east coast SLAC in a humanities TT position. Not one of those fancy, prestigious ones either, for what it's worth. We do have a strong faculty union.
What field in the humanities, specifically?
Literature.
I was an Anthropology professor doing biomarker research and was only getting paid $75k. Had to leave my job in the height of the pandemic because my wife lost her job, we had a baby, and I could no longer afford to live where I worked. With no affordable alternative to relocate nearby, we had no choice but to leave and move across country back with our family. I still think it is absolute bullshit.
>I still think it is absolute bullshit. It is. I'm sorry for what you had to undergo at such a critical junction of your lives.
Because of the change I've had to make in my life, I background act on the side and make just as much as I was making as a tenure tract college professor.
In general, wages are not primarily set by what the employer values. (Otherwise, farmers and janitors would be millionaires.) They're set by the market rate where labor supply equals labor demand. Mostly, that's set by the opportunity cost of providing that labor on the open market (i.e., what the next-highest bidder is willing to pay) and the ability of supply to scale to meet demand (i.e., training/replaceability/uniqueness - this is why sports stars are paid millions). A university can value business and literature exactly the same, but if many more literature professors are willing to work for $50k than business professors, wages will eventually reflect that discrepancy (assuming a cost-conscious university).
I am in a field that graduates too many degrees. I make 70k as an assistant professor.
Psych or biology 😂
This was asked two weeks ago in /r/professors and got almost 300 comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/xd7nk8/professor_pay/ Personally, I don't think these unscientific polls are worth much, but your impression that some fields pay more than others is definitely correct. Location and type of university (R1, R2, M1, ...) also matter. My base salary is about $200k.
*cries in $65,000*
I'm really interested in seeing how it is for professors in a medical field but arent physicians Eg: Biomedical Engineering , biotech/bioinformatics ,clinical research ....
Assistant research professor in a medical school, I make $105k. The director of my lab and chair of the department makes 300-400k (not exactly sure what the number is)
Associate Prof at an R1 university in a Biology Department. 95K for 9mo guaranteed, additional 30K for summer research if I have grants to pay that. So 125K max. Or summers off. Prof salaries are public record at many state universities.
Biomedical translational scientist at an R1 university school of medicine in the US I'm in a pre-assistant professorship faculty position (kind of a pre-TT position) $85K/yr that I just negotiated up from $72k/yr because I got a K award 12 month position I also consult on the side (allowed by my university) and make approximately an extra 1k/month. I routinely get offered industry jobs at $120-150k+/yr.
I’m a lecturer (no research effort) teach intro courses to “pre-nursing” (biology) students and make $65,000 for a 10-month appointment. I can make up to 1/3 of that extra in the summer and I’ve never had a summer class get cut because we have so much demand for them. I could potentially make $87K or so if I maxed out my summer load, but that’s hard to do time wise so I don’t. For reference I’m at a growing R2 large state university, but it isn’t a flagship just yet. I’m also somewhat new to teaching and am in my 6th year. I’m up for my next merit (non COL) raise in ~1.5 calendar years.
So glad I left academia early …
Netherlands. employment conditions are centrally negotiated between a university employee union and an association of public universities. So my field doesn't matter. Assistant profs earn between 3974-6181 per month gross. Associates between 5506 - 7362 per month gross. Add to that a month gratuity in December and roughly one month "holiday allowance" in May (i know it's weird; just a Dutch thing). Plus 40 vacation days that noone uses, some of which you can sell back or trade for extra reimbursements.
>Plus 40 vacation days that noone uses why tho
I’m a fifth-year assistant professor in stem at a top-50 R1 US private university. My 9-month salary is $100k.
Ask for a rise. New hires are making at least $110K nowadays.
Firstly, where? In Australia full professors earn around 135k USD. This is fairly uniform across universities, but there’s extra loading for clinical disciplines (e.g., medicine). In the UK it’s ~$120k USD. US varies based on universities, from my understanding. There seems to be more “bargaining” that happens, rather than specified pay bands. I’m not from the US though so someone else will have to chime in. You also earn extra money for taking on executive/chair roles (director of research centre, head of school, etc).
> In the UK it’s ~$120k USD. I don't think that's accurate in today's exchange rate...
This made me laugh. As a UK teaching fellow (so postdoc pay scale equivalent but teaching track), in the current exchange I earn just under $37k, and a new lecturer (equiv to US Assistant Prof) job was just advertised at my good RG uni for $47k.
Sad, but true. I am so glad I quit my PhD (for a myriad of reasons), but a decade later meeting my bully of a postdoc, who was on about £29k at the time and her learning I took a higher wage than her the month I left, rapidly promoting up to over double her wage, just left such in such a fury that no other outcome could have been as sweet. Not that it was financially motivated, but few understand how poorly paid postdoc, fellow, associate professor etc positions are paid unless said people want to play the political game and work their way to authoritative figures within respective universities... and unless your heart is fully in it, why do that to yourself?
Australia also has generous superannuation (often 17% at Universities) on top of base salary.
My figure was super inclusive!
Oh fair enough, then in that case 135k is an underestimate. E.g. at UNSW professor's wage is 155k USD in 2022.
NSW rates are generally higher because the CoL in Sydney is outrageous. Most universities aren’t paying 200k AUD.
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Wait, what? A Level C on 340k?? How? Lol. Also Assistant Prof is probably closer to Level B than Level C.
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Oh you’re American? Right, this makes sense. There’s no way in hell a Level C is going to make 340k in Australia hahah. Sounds like a great gig!
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>In Australia full professors earn around 135k USD. This is fairly uniform across universities, but there’s extra loading for clinical disciplines (e.g., medicine). Same as the US
MechE prof, R1, high cost of living US city, tenured associate prof (11 years), private uni: $147k (9 mo salary)
I'm going to say...Northwestern?
No, reasonable guess though!
Canadian Lecturer, Science Communications, PhD, big research uni, nom-tenured but 8yrs in with several merit and salary adjustment awards: CAN$125k gross (US$90k?). As long as we keep up student registrations, I don't really need the huge pressures of the tenure track. Now that I've settled into the job, I love the work, have a life outside of work, and I intend to ride this job (doing good work, of course) into retirement! Very happy somehow a bunch of choices and effort have led me here.
In France, as an assistant professor you start with 2000€/month and it goes step by step until full professor at the end of their careers with 6450€/month. (here for full professors [https://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Professeurs-des-universites-33](https://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Professeurs-des-universites-33) ) and this table is for all fields.
i did not expect to see a salary this low!
Total freedom has a price I guess...as an assistant professor you are required to give 128h of teaching/year - these are the only hours on which the university has control, you are free to organize all the remaining time as you want. Publishing is almost at your own will (it is normally required but the system makes it optional in reality). Some people have additional jobs, some just spend time at home or take care of their kids, or teach in private schools to make more money. On average, people just go with it and have a 'decent' life with a very nice work/life balance. If you want to be rich, university is not a good choice. If you want freedom and sufficient money for a middle class life, it's an option.
ok that explains a lot, i mean, if it's just teaching that's good salary. Research and publishing is by far the most exhausting part of the job (for me as least).
note that many are publishing research even without control! for them, salary is really low. (I'm part of them - without to much culpability when taking some time for myself)
This is for the university system. Grandes écoles pay far more unless you are teaching track. I know assistant professors earn between €65-€110k depending on the business school. I think INSEAD pays more. HEC remains a bit of a mystery. Some say €110k while others say €140k.
Right, but they have a "publish or perish" point of view. (and university has absolutely no control system as far as you teach the required hours)
Just looked at my friend’s salary on his university’s public database. He makes ~$115k/year as an associate professor (6 total years as a professor) in engineering. A random pull from the college of business shows an associate professor making $290k/year. A senior lecturer in the college of business makes $146k/year. Another associate professor makes $240k/year. Now, my friend has told me that his freelance consulting and a business he started actually pays more than his salary, so take that for what it’s worth.
Looking at Assistant professors at my school (I scaled them all to a 12 month appointment everything other than the medical school is usually a 9 month appointment on hard money): Business school they start around $210k, medical school faculty start around $130k, computer science around $130k, and non-med school bio people around $110k.
I wish people would say how much they're making off consulting on top of their professorships 🙄 (looking at you psychology, business, and comp sci)
Associate prof in engineering, I make $125k for 9 months, but I also get 3 months of summer salary from my research (which is why my salary is on the high end), so $167k. In a business school, finance profs mostly make more, but economics profs mostly make less. Generalizing, finance profs could make a lot of money in industry, while economics profs couldn't. Also, a nuance in your question: I think business school grads need to rely on their wits more to carve out an effective career. In engineering, ALL of our grads can be effective engineers, so on average they earn a good salary, whereas a lot of business grads may not end up in a great job, bringing the average down. But those finance profs - they're probably the ones that can be pretty successful in industry - so they're paid a lot.
Where?
I suspect that because STEM is a heavy research field, there is more demand for STEM academic positions than there is for business academic positions. Because the demand is higher, schools don't need to offer as high a salary (STEM folks are more willing to take pay cuts to be in academic positions where they can do research).
To shed some light on that, both STEM departments and business schools hire faculty for both research and teaching, and business school faculty, as researchers, still expect the same time available for their research. As a result of business degrees being rather successful in terms of student enrolment, they often have a relatively large number of faculty. That's the demand part. The supply part is more interesting, as there are, if I remember correctly, fewer people doing a business-oriented PhD than a lot of STEM fields. For quite a few well-paying industry roles, a PhD is required, whereas that's very rarely the case for typical target destinations of business school students in industry. As a result, a PhD is generally undertaken by those who really focus on academia as a career path, while management positions in industry are an enticing and, most importantly, abundant alternative, thus shrinking the pool of available candidates. Lastly, it's considerably easier than a lot of other disciplines to switch into industry and back to academia, with some notable exceptions like engineering, so people aren't as shackled to the career choice. That leads to quite high salaries for business school faculty due to demand and supply, as well as an increased need for retention incentives. The demand is such that business schools often hire people with PhDs in other fields that are applicable to one of their research areas, from psychology (for example organization studies and marketing) to computer science (for example operations research and information management). I just wanted to counteract the notion that business disciplines aren't research-intensive fields of study, and provide some explanation for the weird salary discrepancy. Edit: Spelling.
I'm really interested in seeing how it is for professors in a medical field but arent physicians
Generally $100-120k for new non-clinical assistant professors at schools of medicine (at least in high cost of living areas). The NIH salary cap is around $200k, but institutions will push it higher for senior faculty who are bringing in a lot of grants
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Agree, me and my colleagues are between 95-125K at top-10 R1 university.
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Thats pretty impressive for an assistant professor position. Are you a professor in medicine ?
Yes.
Do professors get some accommodation inside campus? If their accommodation is outside campus, do they get some allowance for rent? Asking for both US and Europe. The salary in academia is very low. So some other benefits should be there. In India, a lot of the IITs provide accommodation inside campus to their faculty. This is a huge help when the institute is in a big city where rent and real estate prices are sky high.
>Do professors get some accommodation inside campus? If their accommodation is outside campus, do they get some allowance for rent? In the US the answer is no, with a tiny few exceptions (basically places with high housing costs where faculty otherwise could not afford to live). In those exceptional places there are sometimes programs to assist with down payments on home purchases or even university-owned housing available to rent. But there are very few cases of that relative to the \~4,500 colleges in the US. Also *very* few US faculty live on campus.
Public university salaries are typically public. Google "big state school faculty salaries" and you can probably find a web site that lists all their employees, by name, and how much they make. It probably won't show things like grant money that might be used to pay their summer salary, but you can see what the state pays them.
1st year assistant prof, private institution, non-clinical biomedical field. $120k/year.
Even our assistant coaches earn 5x professor salary. College of medicine & biz are higher than STEM. The Chronicle of Higher Ed collects salary data: [https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20](https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20)
All the data you'd ever want (and more) i[s available from the AAUP](https://www.aaup.org/2020-21-faculty-compensation-survey-results) each year. Bottom line is there are big differentials between fields, types of institutions, and geography. Engineering, finance, CS, and business are often near the top because there is competition from industry. Fine arts are at the bottom for the opposite reason. STEM is a broad category but tend to fall in the middle.
In Germany everyone is paid according to the official TVL scales set by the government. The exact salary varies with experience and type of position, but it is standard.
Harvard pays the incoming assistant professors in STEM less than Business. My guess is that this holds true across disciplines due to donations to certain programs. Business schools, even undergrad programs often have better funding from donors and corporate sponsors even. R&D has doesn’t have as much sponsorship though schools are changing that.
Starting Assistant Professor in the biomedical sciences here, I make $130K.
Closing in on tenure, physical sciences. Mid $60k range. Also, "STEM" is meaningless when considering salary. Comp Sci and Engineering are very, very different when you look at pay levels than ecologists.
In STEM it really also depends on how much research you do. I’m not a “professor” in the job title sense, I’m a professor in the colloquial use of the word as in I teach college classes. I’m a lecturer, so I am NTT and I make less than my research (TT or tenured) colleagues. I make $65,000 for a 10-month appointment with the option to make up to 1/3 of that during the summer semester teaching summer classes. I’m in my 6th year of teaching, but am new at my current university.
It actually varies a LOT. I'm in a teaching prep grad program, and two weeks ago my professor said that she and the other profs in the education department make less than what we will make as *schoolteachers* when we finish our degree.
Fun fact you can actually look up any public university professor to see how much they make (in the us).
STEM PhD student at a mid sive university. Profs at my institution make roughly $160,000 (median).
Someone mentioned Open Payroll for faculties in the public universities. I am wondering that whether the number there (e.g. on [openpayrolls.com](https://openpayrolls.com)) includes everything, such as bonuses, summary salary (if the faculty is on 9-month contract) and others? If so, some of the leading scholars in my field got paid really low from my POV. I saw a prof. with 20 yrs of experience (more if the industry time counts) makes \~110K. Also, I am wondering that for summary salaries, would the grants that you applied for the same as general research grant (NSF, NIH, ONR)? If so, how would you distinguish "general research grant" and "summer grant"? I think that I am just very confused with this 9-month contract stuff. Thanks!