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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Regarding liberal arts professors; here is an almost-perfect Patrick McKenzie sentence, written this time by Megan McArdle:

Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in complete sentences.

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Based on my experience as a TA at a top-tier university, there's unfortunately still quite a need to teach 20-year-olds to write in complete sentences.

Also, while this is true on some level, on another, its not a bad thing for society to support a few people whose sole purpose is to uphold a link to the past (in any of it's incarnations).

Sure they may not provide a lot of utility in terms of increasing production, but they do have a lot of perspective to offer to students.

I don't think the author of this article disputes that tenured experienced professors contribute something to the system. They do. The problem is their huge and disproportionate cost.

I actually think what the author is saying is that the huge and disproportionate cost is what some of the best and brightest have to go through in order to get a job in academia and that the purported advantages of tenure come too late for those that could best make use of them.

I was responding to the author's dig at liberal arts fields above. That while they may seem like expensive hobbies, they are expensive hobbies that are important for society to have.

Though perhaps not at the scale subsidized by academia today.

My uncle is a chemist, and he wanted to see what sort of salary he would have made if he was a tenured chemistry professor, instead of staying in industry. It turns out a tenured chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota makes $190,000. The top paid professors were economics and b-school profs, who made $300K+. In contrast, the highest paid tenured humanities prof made about $90K; most made around $60-$70K. Of course, the highest paid people at the university were administrators ($400K) and sports coaches ($1M+).

We looked up Wisconsin and the pay scales were similar.

I believe every state has a database of state funded university professor salaries, it's pretty eye opening.

Is this surprising? Professors are paid within the academy depending on what sort of salary they could demand outside. Since the demand for industrial chemists is a lot higher than the demand for industrial philosophers, this seems reasonable.

Sort of surprising. Less so for the salaries of the philosophy profs, which were around what I expected. More so for the big salaries of the other profs.

Someone who is a B-school prof isn't necessarily going to make $300K in industry. I mean, this is the University of Minnesota B-school, teaching classes like "Leadership." Not exactly the purview of captains of industry. Likewise, industrial chemists do not typically make $190K. That's $50K more than what my uncle makes as an industrial chemist. Also, these are all taxpayer funded jobs. It seems like the salaries factor in to the new American trend of public sector employees making MORE money than they would in private industry.

These numbers seem entirely consistent with the broader marketplace. A chemist who is herself qualified to be a chemistry professor won't make $190k in industry; $110k might be a better estimate. An executive might not make $300k; the low $200's might be a better estimate for the CEO of a small (~100 people) company. And, forgive me for what will sound like a snarky observation, but a book store clerk is going to make $40k, not $90k. In all cases, there's a base compensation set by supply & demand in the market, and an uplift on that base set by supply & demand in academia.

Isn't the pay of sports coaches largely related to the fact that sports is a big earner for the university? So basically you're paying someone a lot of money to put on a popular show that brings in a lot of money.

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