this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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where are college professors living in their cars?
Community college professor here. I'm lucky enough to be tenured at this point, but when I started teaching, I was making just enough money such that if I had been paying the going rate for rent edit: and health insurance, I would have been losing about $100/month, before taking into account other expenses like food (~~or health insurance~~ or gas or utilities...) (edit: I went back and checked numbers, my memory was a little off). And that was with me teaching 75% at two different schools (so, a total of about 24 units per term when full-time is usually 16 units per term)
I was privileged enough to be able to live with family while I pursued a full-time position and extra work, but many are not so lucky.
So, yeah, college professors are drastically underpaid, on par with K-12 teachers
Everywhere unless they're tenured
It's a little more complicated than that. I think the factors are:
So for example you could be a machine learning Research Professor (non-tenure-track) in a first-tier university and bring in a lot of money through grants. Or you could be a tenured teaching professor at a smaller college and not work in summers and make a mid-level income. Or you could be a part-time instructor (e.g., adjunct faculty) in the humanities and make very little.
Typically, the amount of grant money you receive does not affect your salary. It can affect your job security and it can be a factor in earning tenure, but in general, writing more grant proposals=/=higher pay (just more money for research).
Plus, even at R1 schools, tenure-track positions are often starting out with pretty low pay compared to tuition and very low compared what the professor could be making in private industry. According to this study by National Center for Educational Statistics, only about a third of college budgets are spent on instruction, with about another third on support services (counselors, financial aid, tutoring/library services, accessibility services, etc.), with the remainder spent on administration. But that doesn't look so bad until you realize that at most schools, 50%-75% of the courses are not taught by full-time instructors, but by adjuncts, and adjuncts are often paid at or below the poverty line (about 25k/year in 2020). Even as a tenured instructor with 10 years of salary schedule advancements and a partner with a full-time job in higher education, I'm still living paycheck-to-paycheck.
So, yes, it is more complicated than "all professors are underpaid," but not by much. It's really more like "75% of college instructors are near or below poverty level."
Yeah, I agree that most faculty are underpaid, especially in the humanities. Also, I agree that universities should have more tenure-track Teaching Faculty (whose main job is being good teachers to undergraduates) rather than just having part-time adjuct faculty or research-focused professors who don't really want to teach.
I didn't mean to sound like I was defending the status quo. Just that there are a lot of career considerations that I didn't learn "until it was too late" that I was hoping to communicate to younger generations.
That's fair, and I think a realistic view of the current situation is definitely beneficial for aspiring academics, especially given the current "academic industrial complex" pumping out PhDs far faster than jobs open up.
Agree with the above, with the exception of summer work which is unrelated to what they make from being professors. If you are a college professor and need to keep a second job to keep the roof over your head, then I think the point stands.
Last time I interviewed I saw a couple jobs that had 9-month academic calendar (fall/winter) obligations, for a given salary. If you wanted to teach summer classes at that college for additional pay you were welcome to, or you could just take those months off. or do consulting, or visiting teaching somewhere else, or get a grant to pay your salary while you did research, etc.
My last post got downvoted so I hope it doesn't sound like I love the current academic environment. On the contrary I'm jaded. But if you're just starting out, ask the older people for advice, the more you know the better your chance of survival.
There was an article about a UCLA professor recently.
everywhere there are professors.
It's very common in the US.
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/ucla-professor-says-hes-homeless-due-to-low-pay/amp/
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/homeless-professor-who-lives-her-car
https://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/
You do know these are all about the same lady from 7 years ago. Stop living in the past.
oh, you're like a fake news guy?
seems a bit wildly ignorant in the face of evidence.
2024 is this year, not 7 years ago, by the way.
Oh wow you're right, lol... 3 links to a story about the same person, Ellen Tara James-Penny.
Everywhere indeed.
I don't know, tenure track professors doing research, probably not. But the cost of living here is kind of insane. If we didn't have a double income, my wife would have to take a pretty substantial downgrade in where she lives. Cost of living is getting out of hand everywhere regardless, and the point still stands I think.
There's really a two tiered structure to academia that seems to be hidden from most students. Maybe even 3 tiered. There's the tenure-track research faculty who might teach one class per semester (often less) - they're still underpaid relative to industry equivalent jobs, but they get their research freedom and low six figures after a few years while bringing in seven figure research grants for the university. Mid-six-figures if they're upper admin. There's non-tenure-track adjuncts & academic professionals who teach 3-5 classes per semester, often at multiple universities because no one will give them enough classes to live on, doing the bulk of a university's teaching, especially at 'tier 1 research' universities, and they're lucky to get median salary. There's also a set of tenure-track faculty at universities without big research programs who teach 2-3 classes, maybe do a little bit of research or literature review, but probably without any significant extramural funding. They get paid somewhere in between.
They all get called "professor;" they all have PhDs; there's infighting to keep the faculty as a whole from rising up. I used to tell my students they (or someone on their bahalf) paid about $200 for each of my lectures, and they're free to skip them if they want, but even in a tiny seminar, 10 students, $2000/hour revenue, the highest paid professors are only getting 5% of that (not accounting for out-of-class effort).