Pay for Professors
by Alex
I spent a couple of years of my life working more or less full-time in computing — mostly in the unglamorous job of desktop support. This occasionally resulted in me being given unrestricted access to the computers, offices, and apartments of several famous professors and administrators. I was granted access to this sort of thing because people respected my candor and — mostly — because they really really needed their email fixed immediately. So officially I don’t remember anything about the database containing the annual incomes for every professor in the division. Still, “this seems right to me”:http://insidehighered.com/careers/2005/04/25/pay (scroll down for the straight up dollar amounts).
Like many academic bloggers I’ve been reading the beta of Inside Higher Ed for sometime. However I’ve been hampered by their lack of an RSS feed. I head it’s coming soon, and when it does I’m sure you’ll hear a lot more about the site from many of us — so far it looks pretty decent.
Hey Alex, You know this, but just to make sure that others who read the blog do —- all this is made up of Social Science, Humanities, “Hard Sciences” and other stuff combined – so people in things like Dance and Visual Arts bring the average down while people in Physics and Economics bring it up. At places with Medical Schools the MD teaching faculty also bring it way up. With that said, I had the chance to see a big internal report about faculty salaries two years ago and this seems to replicate that almost perfectly.
CHE also periodically publishes data that distinguishes among disciplines (Mohawk’s point, and a good one) as well as between “beginning” and “advanced.”
The lesson, if there is one, is that we should all go back to graduate school and get PhDs in either Criminology or Organizational Behavior/Economics (the former has the best job market, the latter the best pay).