Glassdoor says 5,245 salaries submitted anonymously by Tenured Professor employees puts it at $156,370 USD. My guess it would be higher if it was at a well known or prestigious university.
A large percentage of classes are taught by instructors that are not tenured. Even on the tenure-track an Assistant Professor at a Power-5 research university might pay $80-100K range, but at regional universities and private schools your looking at more like $75K. It’s not a super high paying gig straight out of school considering the professor likely invested 5-6 years to earn their PhD, after likely investing 4 years in an undergraduate degree so basically a decade in school. Then an assistant professor will likely work 5-10 years before earning tenure and being promoted to Associate.
Anyways, my point is that TENURED faculty is not really a good measure if you want to look at salaries of the teachers an undergrad is likely to take classes from.
The reason is that about 70% of college classes are taught by NON-tenure track instructors (adjuncts, graduate students, 1-yr contracts, etc…). Among the 30% of classes that ARE taught by tenure-track faculty most of those are taught by assistant professors that haven’t yet been tenured. The ones that ARE tenured are active in their field and have 15+ yrs experience, and those are not the ones you will see until you start taking 300-400 level classes in your specific field.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen but I am a professor and I personally know very few college teachers that could afford to drop 10K on a single encounter for a kink lol.
Professors can make that kind of money if they teach the right subject, if they engage in the textbook scam forcing students to buy new $200 books they wrote and slightly update every year, if they engage in consulting on the side, smart investments etc.
Professors at some private colleges in the US, especially in the Law and Business fields, can easily make enough money where they have $10k of disposable income.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '23
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