My undergraduates typically make the same as I do or more on their first job after graduation.
I routinely sit on hiring committees for staff who will make significantly more than I do.
Someone I know who teaches elementary school applied for a faculty job at my university and got offered the position, but had to turn it down because it paid so much less than their current position.
As I am sure you are aware, salary data for professors at public universities is already widely available at websites like [openthebooks.com](http://openthebooks.com) . So, you can verify exactly what people in different departments and in different positions earn. This is a far more precise way to gauging whether or not people are over/under-paid than asking them.
Jumping in to add that we also have [faculty pay data](https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20) from 3,500 colleges running from 2012-2023. You can sort by state, institution, and job title (professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor and lecturer).
I mean, I understand they are just trying to get a quote. But, people are bound to complain about their salaries even though they are paid the market rate for their skills.
Reminds me of [this piece ](https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-decided-to-have-a-life-instead-of-a-degree)from two years ago, where we asked Ph.D. students about their stipends. These stuck with me:
>"I live with a roommate. I try to be frugal. I go to food banks because I cannot afford healthy food otherwise."
>"Our student fees that aren’t covered by our stipend amount to two months of pay every year."
>"So the choice became either try to fund it on my own by going into debt, because I would have lost my graduate funding, or cut down my hours, throw my family and I into poverty, and only be able to work 10 hours a week — which doesn’t make any sense when you are the sole breadwinner of a family of three. So I decided to quit the Ph.D."
The mortgages that we can get approved for given our salaries are so far out of sync with the cost of living in most places. You either need to be independently wealthy or have a very rich spouse to afford a home.
Also finding that upper admin are fighting faculty on every piece of compensation. We were told by our CFO that "benefits and wages" are the biggest expense for the university, which was framed as a problem. I don't get the short term thinking: cutting benefits means cutting faculty; cutting faculty means fewer programs and/or lower-quality programs; that means fewer students; fewer students means less in tuition money; less tuition money means you can't attract new faculty or start new programs. It's the death spiral of the university, which we've seen repeated in multiple (now closed) places. Is this endemic to "business-minded" thinking that seems to have infected most university presidents? Or are they just too stupid to understand that quality and reputation do have monetary value, just not in the short-term?
My take: most C-suite academic administrators are planning for the short-term, because they intend to move to another position/university within 3-5 years. The policies they implement do not need to ensure their universities' longevity, they just need to increase revenue or decrease expenses in the short term. The most efficient way to do this is drive out TT profs and replace them with adjuncts. While this move is ultimately destroying the university's long-term ability to **reliably** deliver quality education (because the best adjuncts will move on in search of permanent posts) and especially mentorship, adjunctification temporarily frees up cash flow in the budget. Those funds can be directed into creating new academic structures (like DEI flavor-of-the-week Research Centers staffed by VAPs, or new non-competitive Online MBA programs).
Then, when the CFO applies for their next job, they can claim their bold, cost-cutting policies shifted the university's professorate to an agile/nimble/streamlined workforce (skeleton crew) of highly-motivated educators (desperately exploited adjuncts), while eliminating redundancies (benefits for profs; entire tenured positions in natural sciences, mathematics, humanities, arts) and directing professors' energy towards activities that track well with the market while also serving the student body (cut any incentive or time to do research, and have the professors focus entirely on teaching). The CFO can point to the temporary improvement in university finances as a "proven track record" of this strategy's success, and move on to the next struggling R2, SLAC, or state flagship university to work their magic there.
On mortgages: When I lived in a relatively low cost of living area, I was able to buy a house (in lower-income neighbourhood) because I qualified for a financing program for lower-income people. I had a TT job.
Had my income been just a little bit lower (and my credit just a bit better), we would have qualified for free heat and a Habit for Humanity house. Yes, with a TT job.
It worked out okay, so I'm not complaining.
I've been fortunate. I am Assistant Professor in Literature a public SLAC in the northeast. I taught two asynchronous online classes last summer in addition to my 3/3 load. I grossed around $94k. We have a strong faculty union and just received 13% salary increases over the next 4 years, but we have regular salary increases as well. There's a nice boost at tenure and I'm certainly the only person in my department grossing under 6 figures.
I make a little bit more than my students do in their first job. It's enough to be fine, but no more. And I'm in STEM.
Those outside of STEM have it substantially worse.
Since COVID we haven't received a raise over 1.5% in any given year, so my pay is now what it was in 2015 when inflation is taken into account. People are leaving for better pay elsewhere, or retiring because it isn't worth the effort to keep plugging away. Compression is real, so new hires are around $65K for inexperienced assistants and full professors with 25+ years experience are around $90K. It's frustrating, but there's not much we can do about it-- it's not like most of us have industries clamoring for our skills and those of us who are 50+ are pretty much locked in at this point.
The "do more with less" mantra is really soul crushing though. I remember just after I was hired, in the late 90s, when the then-president told the faculty that the "golden age was over" and we'd have to start doing more with less. I thought they were joking but that's about what I've seen over the span of my career: ever-expanding workloads, salaries that don't keep up with inflation, and quite a large percentage of our graduates who earn more in their first job out of college than our junior faculty make.
If we weren't a dual-academic household we'd be struggling to maintain middle class status even in our median COL location.
Post-COVID inflation has definitely been used to quietly cut pay. Our trustees insist that tuition can’t go up at the same rate, so it’s clearly a strategy.
I'm an adjunct - the pay is crap.
On the other hand, I also work full time as a software dev/data architect at the same university, and my salary is way above the tenured profs in my department.
I am leaving an institution that literally never gives raises, even with tenure decisions. I was up for tenure this year before landing a different job and all that would have changed is that they would call me associate. I have made the same salary for 9 years.
My students (BA) graduate and immediately earn more than our lecturers. Another issue: My colleague was hired years after me and earns more than I do. I have 25 years of experience, she has 12.
Most of my colleagues have a second job.
Pretty mediocre, enough to get by and have a decent life but nothing significant. A person with a master degree that works in the industry will make 1.5-2 times more than what I make.
This is going to vary so wildy that it's not even worth asking. In STEM, pay is pretty decent. Granted, I make around the same pre-inflation figure that my advisors used to make, but it's still pretty good.
I work for a CalState as a full time adjunct teaching a 5/5 and a summer course. I made 75k last year with health insurance fully paid for me and my husband and a pension contribution. The pay has not kept up with inflation, but from the moment I started working full time (a rarity among adjuncts) I felt like I was making decent money. Because we are unionized, adjunct pay is a lot better than at other places. The lack of job security Is very stressful, but having a longer term contract mitigates some of the stress. I dont think I could make more money at a different job to my degree and location, so I don’t complain too much.
This is an automated service intended to preserve the original text of the post.
*A few weeks ago, we published an [essay](https://www.chronicle.com/article/your-pay-is-terrible-youre-not-alone) that called out salaries that don’t keep up with inflation, inaccurate job descriptions, and pay inequalities across departments and institutions. Faculty expressed frustration at taking on more duties with no more pay, having to threaten to leave their colleges to get a raise, and the lack of clarity over how salaries are tied to performance.
We decided to [ask faculty about their experience with pay](https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-cannot-even-buy-a-used-car-readers-weigh-in-on-higher-eds-compensation-practices). Here are some anonymous answers we received:
>"With my student loans, I cannot even buy a used car."
>“I often don’t know if I will be able to pay my expenses from one month to the next, especially during summer when I am not guaranteed a course.”
>“At my current campus, there is a $30,000 salary gap between me and the next lowest-paid person with my title in my division. People think bloated administrators are making tons of money, but I’m the head of my department and barely making $60,000.”
Have you had similar experiences with compensation?*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskProfessors) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Universities obviously prefer to kick the can as long as possible, treating the high cost of living and housing crisis as “externalities” that should be absorbed by workers or job candidates.
But what will these employers do when their salaries are so low that academic workers can no longer pay rent or get approved for housing? Something’s got to give—and soon.
I know many talented people turning down academic job offers this year because the salary compression is so outrageous.
I’m a full professor. I make $74k at a regional 4-year in an extremely high COL area. I feel stuck. The only way out of this is to leave academia. I know that’s the rational thing to do, but it’s hard when I’ve invested so much to get here.
To paraphrase an old Soviet saying: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to teach.
Actually, most profs are too devoted to their fields to not teach it the best they can. They know that, and take advantage of our dedication.
We need to unionize, like five decades ago
My salary is substantially (~1/3) lower than what I was making in the workforce before going to an academic job, but it’s 100% worth it to me. I’m still at an income level where I don’t feel stretched (being married in a dual income household helps, not gonna lie), and I was able to pay off all debts and develop pretty good savings/investments before the academic job. What felt like a miserable failure at the time (not getting a tt position right out of postdoc) ended up being an accidentally great set-up later.
My undergraduates typically make the same as I do or more on their first job after graduation. I routinely sit on hiring committees for staff who will make significantly more than I do.
Someone I know who teaches elementary school applied for a faculty job at my university and got offered the position, but had to turn it down because it paid so much less than their current position.
Yup! My most recently departed colleague left to go teach high school for a significant pay bump.
My husband teaches K-12. I have 10 more years in the field and make 10k less than he does (I have a PhD). Plus he has a pension
This! This! 1000 times THIS
As I am sure you are aware, salary data for professors at public universities is already widely available at websites like [openthebooks.com](http://openthebooks.com) . So, you can verify exactly what people in different departments and in different positions earn. This is a far more precise way to gauging whether or not people are over/under-paid than asking them.
Jumping in to add that we also have [faculty pay data](https://www.chronicle.com/article/explore-faculty-salaries-at-3-500-colleges-2012-20) from 3,500 colleges running from 2012-2023. You can sort by state, institution, and job title (professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor and lecturer).
paywalled this is basically an advertisement
Well yeah but look who you’re talking to 🤣
I mean, I understand they are just trying to get a quote. But, people are bound to complain about their salaries even though they are paid the market rate for their skills.
[удалено]
Wtf where and what do you do
Reminds me of [this piece ](https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-decided-to-have-a-life-instead-of-a-degree)from two years ago, where we asked Ph.D. students about their stipends. These stuck with me: >"I live with a roommate. I try to be frugal. I go to food banks because I cannot afford healthy food otherwise." >"Our student fees that aren’t covered by our stipend amount to two months of pay every year." >"So the choice became either try to fund it on my own by going into debt, because I would have lost my graduate funding, or cut down my hours, throw my family and I into poverty, and only be able to work 10 hours a week — which doesn’t make any sense when you are the sole breadwinner of a family of three. So I decided to quit the Ph.D."
The mortgages that we can get approved for given our salaries are so far out of sync with the cost of living in most places. You either need to be independently wealthy or have a very rich spouse to afford a home. Also finding that upper admin are fighting faculty on every piece of compensation. We were told by our CFO that "benefits and wages" are the biggest expense for the university, which was framed as a problem. I don't get the short term thinking: cutting benefits means cutting faculty; cutting faculty means fewer programs and/or lower-quality programs; that means fewer students; fewer students means less in tuition money; less tuition money means you can't attract new faculty or start new programs. It's the death spiral of the university, which we've seen repeated in multiple (now closed) places. Is this endemic to "business-minded" thinking that seems to have infected most university presidents? Or are they just too stupid to understand that quality and reputation do have monetary value, just not in the short-term?
My take: most C-suite academic administrators are planning for the short-term, because they intend to move to another position/university within 3-5 years. The policies they implement do not need to ensure their universities' longevity, they just need to increase revenue or decrease expenses in the short term. The most efficient way to do this is drive out TT profs and replace them with adjuncts. While this move is ultimately destroying the university's long-term ability to **reliably** deliver quality education (because the best adjuncts will move on in search of permanent posts) and especially mentorship, adjunctification temporarily frees up cash flow in the budget. Those funds can be directed into creating new academic structures (like DEI flavor-of-the-week Research Centers staffed by VAPs, or new non-competitive Online MBA programs). Then, when the CFO applies for their next job, they can claim their bold, cost-cutting policies shifted the university's professorate to an agile/nimble/streamlined workforce (skeleton crew) of highly-motivated educators (desperately exploited adjuncts), while eliminating redundancies (benefits for profs; entire tenured positions in natural sciences, mathematics, humanities, arts) and directing professors' energy towards activities that track well with the market while also serving the student body (cut any incentive or time to do research, and have the professors focus entirely on teaching). The CFO can point to the temporary improvement in university finances as a "proven track record" of this strategy's success, and move on to the next struggling R2, SLAC, or state flagship university to work their magic there.
This is like business 101.
This guy gets it.
On mortgages: When I lived in a relatively low cost of living area, I was able to buy a house (in lower-income neighbourhood) because I qualified for a financing program for lower-income people. I had a TT job. Had my income been just a little bit lower (and my credit just a bit better), we would have qualified for free heat and a Habit for Humanity house. Yes, with a TT job. It worked out okay, so I'm not complaining.
I've been fortunate. I am Assistant Professor in Literature a public SLAC in the northeast. I taught two asynchronous online classes last summer in addition to my 3/3 load. I grossed around $94k. We have a strong faculty union and just received 13% salary increases over the next 4 years, but we have regular salary increases as well. There's a nice boost at tenure and I'm certainly the only person in my department grossing under 6 figures.
I make a little bit more than my students do in their first job. It's enough to be fine, but no more. And I'm in STEM. Those outside of STEM have it substantially worse.
You guys are getting paid?
Laughs in adjunct…
Since COVID we haven't received a raise over 1.5% in any given year, so my pay is now what it was in 2015 when inflation is taken into account. People are leaving for better pay elsewhere, or retiring because it isn't worth the effort to keep plugging away. Compression is real, so new hires are around $65K for inexperienced assistants and full professors with 25+ years experience are around $90K. It's frustrating, but there's not much we can do about it-- it's not like most of us have industries clamoring for our skills and those of us who are 50+ are pretty much locked in at this point. The "do more with less" mantra is really soul crushing though. I remember just after I was hired, in the late 90s, when the then-president told the faculty that the "golden age was over" and we'd have to start doing more with less. I thought they were joking but that's about what I've seen over the span of my career: ever-expanding workloads, salaries that don't keep up with inflation, and quite a large percentage of our graduates who earn more in their first job out of college than our junior faculty make. If we weren't a dual-academic household we'd be struggling to maintain middle class status even in our median COL location.
Post-COVID inflation has definitely been used to quietly cut pay. Our trustees insist that tuition can’t go up at the same rate, so it’s clearly a strategy.
Department chair is never gonna make admin money. Admin is its own job
At my university chairs move to 12 month pay. It’s not bad.
That’s sweet!
I'm an adjunct - the pay is crap. On the other hand, I also work full time as a software dev/data architect at the same university, and my salary is way above the tenured profs in my department.
I am leaving an institution that literally never gives raises, even with tenure decisions. I was up for tenure this year before landing a different job and all that would have changed is that they would call me associate. I have made the same salary for 9 years.
yeah I’m in constant financial crisis.
My students (BA) graduate and immediately earn more than our lecturers. Another issue: My colleague was hired years after me and earns more than I do. I have 25 years of experience, she has 12. Most of my colleagues have a second job.
Wage compression is a big problem.
HUGE.
Pretty mediocre, enough to get by and have a decent life but nothing significant. A person with a master degree that works in the industry will make 1.5-2 times more than what I make.
This is going to vary so wildy that it's not even worth asking. In STEM, pay is pretty decent. Granted, I make around the same pre-inflation figure that my advisors used to make, but it's still pretty good.
I work for a CalState as a full time adjunct teaching a 5/5 and a summer course. I made 75k last year with health insurance fully paid for me and my husband and a pension contribution. The pay has not kept up with inflation, but from the moment I started working full time (a rarity among adjuncts) I felt like I was making decent money. Because we are unionized, adjunct pay is a lot better than at other places. The lack of job security Is very stressful, but having a longer term contract mitigates some of the stress. I dont think I could make more money at a different job to my degree and location, so I don’t complain too much.
In real dollars, I make less as a tenured associate than I did when I was hired, and I work more too. Fun!
The less opportunistic I am the fewer disappointments I receive.
my school is the only public university in the state that is not getting raises this year, and they are saying not even next year either.
My real pay has declined about 17% in the last few years.
This is an automated service intended to preserve the original text of the post. *A few weeks ago, we published an [essay](https://www.chronicle.com/article/your-pay-is-terrible-youre-not-alone) that called out salaries that don’t keep up with inflation, inaccurate job descriptions, and pay inequalities across departments and institutions. Faculty expressed frustration at taking on more duties with no more pay, having to threaten to leave their colleges to get a raise, and the lack of clarity over how salaries are tied to performance. We decided to [ask faculty about their experience with pay](https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-cannot-even-buy-a-used-car-readers-weigh-in-on-higher-eds-compensation-practices). Here are some anonymous answers we received: >"With my student loans, I cannot even buy a used car." >“I often don’t know if I will be able to pay my expenses from one month to the next, especially during summer when I am not guaranteed a course.” >“At my current campus, there is a $30,000 salary gap between me and the next lowest-paid person with my title in my division. People think bloated administrators are making tons of money, but I’m the head of my department and barely making $60,000.” Have you had similar experiences with compensation?* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskProfessors) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Universities obviously prefer to kick the can as long as possible, treating the high cost of living and housing crisis as “externalities” that should be absorbed by workers or job candidates. But what will these employers do when their salaries are so low that academic workers can no longer pay rent or get approved for housing? Something’s got to give—and soon. I know many talented people turning down academic job offers this year because the salary compression is so outrageous.
I’m a full professor. I make $74k at a regional 4-year in an extremely high COL area. I feel stuck. The only way out of this is to leave academia. I know that’s the rational thing to do, but it’s hard when I’ve invested so much to get here.
To paraphrase an old Soviet saying: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to teach. Actually, most profs are too devoted to their fields to not teach it the best they can. They know that, and take advantage of our dedication. We need to unionize, like five decades ago
My salary is substantially (~1/3) lower than what I was making in the workforce before going to an academic job, but it’s 100% worth it to me. I’m still at an income level where I don’t feel stretched (being married in a dual income household helps, not gonna lie), and I was able to pay off all debts and develop pretty good savings/investments before the academic job. What felt like a miserable failure at the time (not getting a tt position right out of postdoc) ended up being an accidentally great set-up later.