The Price Professors Pay for Teaching at Public Universities (Chronicle)

[eppur_se_muova]

A two-month-old article, but worth posting:

The Price Professors Pay for Teaching at Public Universities
Private institutions offer more, and the gap is becoming unbridgeable

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

You're a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It's a prestigious university with big-time resources and colleagues. What are these perks worth to you? Maybe $10,000 a year? What about Madison's low crime rate? Or its small-town charm brightened with intellectual liveliness, a rare combination that nabs it a berth on many best-places-to-live lists? Is that worth another $10,000 a year? Is Madison's fabulousness -- what one professor calls "the lake effect" -- worth half a million dollars over the length of your career?

Because that's the difference, on average, between toiling at Madison, a public university, and being a professor at, say, Northwestern University, a private research university of similar prestige. You don't even have to go to a top Ivy to get those extra thousands. Northwestern is just one of 11 top privates that pay $25,000 more on average to full professors than does Wisconsin, where they earn an average of $90,000 per year.

Twenty years ago, teaching at a top public university like Wisconsin didn't mean living a few notches down on the pay scale. The publics and privates paid comparable salaries. Time and changes in the American economy have carved a gap between the two, a gap so large that one researcher now wonders whether it can ever close up again.

more: http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i32/32a01801.htm

Note that the chart is for FULL professors at Carnegie Research Category I universities (probably because this is the category for which they have the most complete dataset). Associate and Assistant Professors make considerably less, and Instructors usually even less. And moving just a notch or two down in the Carnegie scale means moving down in salary as well. The numbers for the Private, Carnegie Research I, Full Professors are the highest in the country.

[Demeter]

1. How Much Does Money Enter Into Your Happiness Equation?

That is the underlying question. Greedy people are NEVER happy, because they are compulsive.

If your income matches your needs and goals, rejoice.

[readmoreoften]

2. Yeah but this is only FULL PROFESSORS. How many adjuncts do they use? That's the real story.

What's the tenure rate at this private universities let alone the number of FULL PROFESSORS. By the way, the reason I keep capitalizing that term is because an extremely high portion of faculty never make full professor.

You're an assistant prof when you're on the tenure track for the first 7 years
You're an associate prof if and when they give you tenute. (Privates are notorious for dropping tenure tracks in year 6 for a cheaper new tenure track)
At some mystical point of service around 20 years in you seem to become a FULL PROFESSOR.

For example, at NYU only 28% of faculty are even on the tenure track. Most are adjuncts making $4000 a course and teaching assistants. Publics have much higher rates of tenure. If you're an associate professor at a public university making $65K a year you're WAY better off than an adjunct working twice the teaching load and making $16000 without benefits.

[MountainLaurel]

5. You've got it

When my husband was in grad school at one of the most expensive universities in the country (not an Ivy, but pretty well respected), I think 2/3 of all classes at the graduate level were taught by adjuncts.

[jody]

3. Salaries are important not only for what a prof can buy but also for the implied value of her/his

scholarly efforts.

The self-esteem of playing baseball in the Majors v. AAA v. AA v. A is well known but such a pecking order also exists among colleges and universities.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Oops, not 2 months old -- 2 months + 7 years!

I find it hard to imagine that things have not gotten even worse in the last 7 years. In particular, the reliance on adjunct (part-time, no benefits) and temporary (non-tenure track) faculty has grown dramatically.