Hacker News Reader

Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility. Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).

View on HN

Indeed, a large portion of a professor's duties are administrative.

...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...

I’m happy to accept a job where my housing is subsidized. What university is this?

I recall that universities in extremely expensive places like UCLA, Stanford etc subsidize housing and/or provide specially priced housing for staff and faculty. Not to say they are cheap, they are just tolerable given the salaries, which is more than you can say with regular market pricing.

Stanford does have faculty housing: it's made available for the tenured faculty member to rent for life. The school owns the house. The professor builds no equity.

The alternative, given the cost of housing near Stanford and faculty salaries, would be for faculty to live over an hour distant. The university acknowledges the benefit of having faculty live nearby, and also recovers the rent money and keeps the property.

And yet, a lot of Stanford's faculty live right next to campus. It turns out all those startup board seats are lucrative enough that they can actually afford a house in the local area.

1. Those universities subsidize housing because the salaries that they offer would otherwise attract zero candidates due to the local cost of living.

2. It is usually the case that the university then owns a share of the equity in your house, and is owed a share of the profits when you sell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com