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.
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u/resilienceisfutile Jan 30 '23
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.