Unlike the recent release of Wall Street CEO compensation, which made every news report, the publication in the Chronicle of Higher Education of faculty salaries created nary a newsworthy ripple. We know college professors aren’t pulling down the big bucks, so their salaries are of no interest to us. Yet in some countries, college teaching is a profession as revered as doctors, lawyers, and financiers, and salaries are comparable to those professions. That doesn’t happen in the United States, where education — even at the university level — is looked upon as a right and not a privilege. Consequently, teachers at all levels are treated like public servants (even in private institutions) more than experts whose wisdom is highly valued.
For the past two years, states have either frozen or cut the budgets of public universities as they generally have in school systems K-12. We pay lip service to education and argue over what tests to administer and at what levels, but when it comes to making teaching a desirable profession for the best recent graduates, the United States is not making headway.
| What kids are reading |
| This weekly column looks at lists of books kids are reading in various categories. Information on the books below came from Amazon.com’s list of best-sellers for children. They are listed in order of popularity. |
| Books on spring (continued from last week) |
| 1. Spring by Gerda Muller (Baby-Preschool) |
| 2. How Robin Saved Spring by Debbie Ouellet and Nicoletta Ceccoli (Ages 4-8) |
| 3. The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson and Jan Davey Ellis (Ages 4-8)) |
| 4. Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit: A Book of Changing Seasons by Il Sung Na (Baby-Preschool) |
| 5. Clifford’s Spring Clean-Up (Clifford the Big Red Dog) by Norman Bridwell (Ages 4-8) |
| 6. Hooray for Spring by Kazuo Iwamura (Ages 4-8) |
| 7. Spring Is Here!: A Story About Seeds by Joan Holub and Will Terry (Ages 4-8) |
| 8. Wake Me In Spring! by James Preller and Jeffrey Scherer (Ages 4-8) |
The Chronicle reports that the average salary for a newly hired college professor is $56,000 for public and $60,000 for private institutions, based on information received from 1,300 colleges and universities. Salaries increase with rank, and a few professors can aspire to as much as $190,000 if they teach at an elite private school, or $150,000 at a handful of public universities. But those higher figures are anomalies: most college teachers are paid somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000 during the course of their careers.
Also interesting is the hierarchy of disciplines and their attendant salaries: The fields of economics, business administration, and law pay much better than philosophy, education, or the fine arts. That’s been true for 30 years, but the gap has widened dramatically in the last decade. Professors of law are currently paid, on average, 72 percent more than professors in the visual and performing arts. The gap between business and education is 65 percent. These discrepancies reflect our collective attitudes toward education and the arts versus business and law.
How can we give the college teaching profession greater dignity and a level of professionalism more in line with countries whose students will become our global competitors in science and industry? Raising all salaries is not the answer, despite my assertion than salaries are lower than they should be. Professors are paid commensurate with the status society gives them. They are considered necessary and fairly good, all around, but not in the same league as good doctors or good lawyers.
We need to change the perception of what constitutes an expert in academia, and recognize that acquiring the skills to teach college level courses takes the same number of years as law or medical school. Once we accord the same respect to Ph.D. degrees as we do M.D.s and LL.D.s, more of our best graduates will want to become college professors. Greater respect might even, in time, lead to higher salaries. That, in turn, will strengthen the profession, the quality of classroom instruction, and students’ attitudes toward their studies. Academics are often not a student’s first priority — the subject of my next column.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. Email her at [email protected]
