Contrasts in Pay for Full Professors
At San Francisco State University, just 20 miles from the University of California at Berkeley, the average pay for full professors is 60 percent of what it is at Berkeley.
Thirty miles south of San Francisco State is Stanford University, the private doctoral institution with the highest faculty pay in the country. Full professors there earned $210,339, on average, in 2013-14. Brad Hayward, a university spokesman, attributed the high pay in part to the area’s housing costs. The median sales price for a single-family home in the surrounding city, Palo Alto, is $2.4 million, according to the real-estate website Trulia.
Among public doctoral institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles paid full professors the most in 2013-14: $170,361, on average. That is $40,000 less than what Stanford pays. UCLA’s vice chancellor for academic personnel, Carole Goldberg, said in an email that “generous faculty-recruitment packages offered by private institutions make it challenging for us to compete.”
But UCLA tries to meet competing salary offers and provides other advantages as well, she wrote, among them its location in a city that offers opportunities for partners and spouses, and the chance to serve “a powerfully important social end by educating a large percentage of students who are Pell Grant recipients, first-generation collegegoers, and from diverse backgrounds.”
“The proof of our competitiveness is in our success in recruiting and retaining faculty,” she wrote. When the university competes against other institutions, she said, about three-quarters of the time its offers are accepted and the new hires stay at UCLA for at least a year.
At the 23 campuses in the California State University system, almost all of them master’s institutions, average pay for full professors ranged from $85,869 to $98,721 in 2013-14.
Lillian Taiz, who recently ended eight years as president of the California Faculty Association, a union that represents the system’s professors, said they are often attracted to teaching the type of students California State serves, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college. But the search for affordable housing forces many professors to live far from their campuses, she said, and the long commute gives them less time to focus on their students. — Sandhya Kambhampati
Sparse Data on Adjunct Pay
While the average salaries for professors are widely tracked, data on adjuncts’ pay is hard to come by.
The Chronicle’s Adjunct Project, which collects crowdsourced data, found that from January 2014 to April 2015, the average self-reported pay for adjuncts was $2,943 per three-credit course.
The highest-paid courses are in the field of law, $5,363; followed by architecture and design, $4,451; journalism, $4,400; and engineering, $4,319.
Whether at the high end or low end of the adjunct scale, “all the salaries are awful,” said Gary D. Rhoades, a professor of education at the University of Arizona and director of its Center for the Study of Higher Education. He is also a former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors.
Adjuncts who teach law and journalism are likely to be practicing professionals who are paid a “premium” to come into the classroom, he said, accounting for their higher-than-average pay.
The lack of data on the pay of adjuncts is troubling not only to them but also to researchers.
Marisa Allison, an adjunct for 13 years and director of research at the New Faculty Majority, a nonprofit group focused on equity for adjuncts and contingent faculty members, said adjuncts cannot easily compare average pay at two colleges, the way full professors can.
The U.S. Department of Education used to collect information on adjuncts through its National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, but it stopped gathering that information after 2004.
It’s important for parents to know the working conditions of the people teaching their children, Ms. Allison said, “especially because students aren’t paying differently for courses taught by adjuncts versus other professors.” — Sandhya Kambhampati
The Nontraditional College Chief
In the past academic year, nearly 12 percent of newly appointed college presidents held jobs outside academe just before assuming the top post on campus, according to an analysis of The Chronicle’s Gazette listings. In 2013-14, the figure was only 8 percent.
New chiefs appointed in the past academic year include former leaders in government, nonprofit organizations, private-equity firms, and even a food company. Jody Horner, who was president of Cargill Meat Solutions and Cargill Case Ready, took the top post at Midland University, in Nebraska, in February.
Kevin F.F. Quigley served as country director of the Peace Corps in Thailand before he took the helm at Marlboro College, in Vermont, on July 1. Given current financial challenges, he said, executive-search committees want leaders who have “substantial experience in fund raising.” A nontraditional candidate can demonstrate desirable skills, he said, like “attracting and retaining great people, utilizing technology appropriately, and communicating.”
Earlier in his career, Mr. Quigley was an administrator at a nonprofit organization, a private consultant, a senatorial staff member, and an adjunct faculty member. As director of public policy at Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, from 1989 to 1995, he oversaw international grant-making projects, including support for “a liberal-arts college in Bulgaria based at a former Communist Party training institute,” he said.
A Swarthmore College alumnus, Mr. Quigley said his liberal-arts experience shaped his career and drew him to Marlboro.
“My background is a case study for what a liberal-arts education can let you do, which is anything and everything,” he said. “You think, here I am, a guy who graduated in the humanities” and then “did a graduate degree in Irish literature, writing about Ulysses, but my life’s work has been about the intersection of economics and politics.” Marlboro enrolls fewer than 300 undergraduates, who share in administrative decisions via town-hall meetings. That profile fit his interest in “how to develop democratic culture,” he said.
John I. Williams Jr., another new president of a liberal-arts institution who has a nontraditional background, has held executive positions at nonprofit organizations, American Express, and several start-ups. He became president of Muhlenberg College in July. His most recent previous position was as a partner in the higher-education practice of the nonprofit Bridgespan Group, in Boston. He has also worked as an entrepreneur and as a corporate executive, and he is a life trustee of Amherst College.
“I wouldn’t separate out my business career from my involvement in higher education,” he said. “There is a lot to learn from any walk of life that can be applied to another walk of life.”
Faculty members and college administrators aren’t all that different from businesspeople, lawyers, and doctors, in spite of their contrasting disciplines, backgrounds, and training, Mr. Williams said. Many models of management “can be applied across those divides.” — Isaac Stein
Correction (August 20, 2015, 11:00 a.m.): Because of a proofreading error, the original version of this article said that only about three-quarters of new hires stay at the University of California at Los Angeles for at least a year. The fraction is far greater than that. Three-quarters refers to the share of people who both accept a job at UCLA when an offer is made and then stay there for at least a year. The text has been corrected.
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