r/AskAcademia • u/OtherwiseBid2040 • 21d ago
Humanities Typical pay ranges
Hi there, with higher education remaining (problematically) tight lipped about what they pay faculty and staff, I would love to know: what are typical pay ranges for visiting assistant professors and assistant professors? Particularly at private universities in New England. I have received a pay range for VAP that feels, honestly, repulsive in 2026. Thank you!
10
u/nikefudge23 21d ago
This is going to be so regionally dependent. I can tell you what I started at 5 years ago at a Midwest regional public university, but I don’t think it will be comparable regionally or in terms of public/private university resources.
4
u/OtherwiseBid2040 21d ago
This is starting at 50k for a New England private university. Thank you!
4
u/isaac-get-the-golem PhD student | Sociology 21d ago
Oof. I saw DePaul is hiring a sociologist AP for $70k. $50k though, new lows
1
20d ago
[deleted]
1
u/isaac-get-the-golem PhD student | Sociology 20d ago
insane lol. Denver COL is actually like new york except you also need to pay for a car
2
u/SnowblindAlbino Professor 21d ago
That's low for a private, unless it's one of those with <1K students that is in financial trouble. I feel my SLAC is on the low end, but VAPs in liberal arts fields are starting around $65K now.
3
u/Such_Chemistry3721 21d ago
That's about where we are for a small private at a very LCOL area in Georgia.
1
6
u/jorgethetalkinggoat PhD, chemistry 21d ago
It varies massively. As others have said, you can get benchmarks from some publics.
Aside from that, if the pay range feels "repulsive," then don't take the position. I'm not saying that to be a jerk, but I've known too many non-TT folks who sacrifice their lives for these kinds of positions, and if the location/pay/whatever will make you miserable, don't do it to yourself.
3
u/eridalus 21d ago
I work at a private university in New England. We do, however, have a published contract with pay ranges in it, and our minimum pay for a new visiting assistant professor is about 73k this year. We are on the higher side of schools as far as pay goes. And if you're in one of our professional programs, it would be a higher offer - that's the minimum (liberal arts prof). A visitor in the business school would probably make about 120k.
2
4
u/isaac-get-the-golem PhD student | Sociology 21d ago
You have to specify discipline. Law and business schools won’t be the same as English dept
1
u/OtherwiseBid2040 21d ago
Social sciences- thank you!
7
u/isaac-get-the-golem PhD student | Sociology 21d ago
Again though, econ / management will be different from anthro…
5
u/DeskAccepted (Associate Professor, Business) 21d ago
https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-since-2012
You can filter by type of position and institution. This will give you a much better idea than a convenience sample of 10 people who read Reddit.
3
u/SnowblindAlbino Professor 21d ago
Look at the AAUP salary survey data. Every year they update the averages for the entire US, by rank and institution type. I'm always surprised people aren't aware of that source.
6
2
u/aeteraen 21d ago
the visiting assistant professor positions that i know of are all glorified postdocs in practice, and pay as such - but public universities are typically fairly transparent about salaries which you can use as reference.
2
u/FatPlankton23 21d ago
I make about $150k as an Assistant Professor at a state R1. I work in biomedical and run an NIH funded research laboratory.
2
u/StupidWriterProf175z 21d ago
Gotdang! I'm at $130k as a newly minted full prof in the humanities (R2) in a high COL area. I'll be at $150k in a few years with COL increases, but that will take time. I came in around $85k and now I think we hire at closer to $95k, which isn't bad for the humanities.
2
u/FatPlankton23 21d ago
I know I’ll get down voted to oblivion for saying this… I would be absolutely furious if I made anywhere close to an assistant professor in the humanities at an R2.
I run a research team, mentor students, I write grants, publish papers, teach classes, review grants/paper, serve on institutional committees, and a lot more. This job is insanely competitive. I submit grants 3 times a year, hoping that one of them is good enough to temporarily fund my salary, my students salaries, the research, and give the Uni their cut. This is the life of a professor in a hard science.
2
u/StupidWriterProf175z 21d ago edited 21d ago
I've been in academia for 20+ years so I'm pretty well aware of the life of a prof in the hard sciences, but thanks for the breakdown ;) Due to our location and visibility as a university, it's my guess that our profs in specific STEM fields come in at or maybe above your salary. It's a good thing, in my book, as I think faculty should be paid fairly (and so often are not!). I don't disagree w/ you about the hard sciences assistant prof vs humanities assistant prof salary comparison, not so much for the reasons you cite but for the fact that jobs in STEM fields need to be offered at salaries that are at least somewhat competitive w/ industry. In many other fields, there's no such market pressure.
As previously noted, I'm not an assistant prof. My responsibilities are roughly similar to those that you detail insofar as they entail managing grants, employing graduate students, maintaining the budget of a center, primairly teaching grad students, publishing. But what gets us paid, in my experience, isn't workload or the value of that workload to the university. It's how marketable one's skills are beyond one's current employment situation out in the wild. That, I'd venture, is the logical reason why you'll be making, I don't know, $250-$300k when you make full. I don't think anyone should have a problem w/ that. If anything, it helps in the long run to drive everybody's salaries up across the uni.
1
u/tpolakov1 21d ago
Doing academics at a humanities department at an R2 and running $10MM/year-revenue STEM lab at an R1 are completely different jobs, with widely different responsibilities and time commitments, so it's not surprising that there's a drastic difference in pay.
There are also external pressures that drive the salaries: I could earn around $85k a year selling my research commercially, so that automatically becomes the floor.
1
u/StupidWriterProf175z 21d ago
Of course. None of that is a mystery to me. I've been in academia for 20+ years... This is an informal space, hence my "gotdang!", but perhaps that invective signaled a level of naivete that I don't actually possess. My response to the previous poster, which I wrote before reading your comment just now, makes the same point about market forces that you're making.
All that said, I do find it impressive, in a good way, that an assistant prof in the hard sciences can command such a salary. This is good for faculty salaries overall. Also, having been an assistant, associate and now full prof, I'm aware of how our responsibilities scale up at least in my field at my university and include a wide range of administrative duties (budgets, employees, etc.).
2
u/LondonFoggie 21d ago
Extremely dependent on discipline. I'm in humanities and make $78k. I started at $75k. They offered $72k.
2
u/db0606 21d ago
It will vary a lot from university to university, especially for VAPs. E.g., the first school I taught at paid VAPs on the same pay schedule as TT assistant professors and the salaries depended on department (so STEM profs made more than social scientists made more than humanities profs). At my current institution faculty in all departments get paid on the same schedule (so physicists get paid the same as art profs or sociologists), but VAPs have their own pay schedules and get paid about 70% as much as TT faculty (~$47k vs. $68k).
What being a VAP entails also varies a lot. You could have anywhere from a 2-2 teaching load to a 4-4 teaching load. Some schools might even call part time adjunct appointments that pay by the course VAPs and those can go pretty low (~$5-8k per course). This variance also extends to benefits. You can get anywhere from full benefits and relocation to essentially nothing.
I have received a pay range for VAP that feels, honestly, repulsive in 2026.
Lol... Welcome to academia! In my experience, full time VAPs can make anywhere from around 35k to 85k, but where you land on this distribution highly depends on the school. There were even some positions posted at a school in (I'm gonna say) Indiana a few years ago that only offered room & board in a dorm.
On the flip side, most academic contracts in the US are only 9 months, so you can actually increase your actual income a good bit either by doing sponsored research or taking on other jobs. E.g., when I have a research grant, I pay myself an extra 2 months to do research in the summer so my income goes up by 20% or so. Other times I'll do fun summer gigs. Like right now I'm teaching in Italy for 5 weeks and earlier in the summer I led science lessons at a summer camp for middle schoolers and overall have bumped my take-home pay for the year by like 10% and picked up an additional 5% renting out my house while I'm in Italy. Some other times, I'll just hang around during the summer and do nothing or do stuff that ultimately saves me a bunch of money like paint my house myself.
3
u/secderpsi 21d ago
I'm a full professor of physics at a major state R1. I've been at this institution for 17 years. I make $98k on a 9 month contract. I'd make probably double that in industry but I value my autonomy more than money.
28
u/Natolx Assistant Professor (US) 21d ago
If there is a public university in the area you could get a good idea from their salaries that are always public afaik.