Canadian Professors Are Best Paid in the World—Again

The latest project that looks at professorial paychecks shows that the United States lags behind Canada, India, Italy, and South Africa when it comes to the purchasing power of their salaries and academic fringe benefits, according to data compiled jointly by the Laboratory for Institutional Analysis from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and the Boston College Center for International Higher Education. The data, which cover 28 countries, look only at full-time professors at a time when adjuncts are employed in greater numbers, and the data deal only with professors at public universities. The study, which will be released shortly as a book, evaluates the local purchasing power of those paychecks to rank countries, which could explain the high position of some. However, Canada has consistently reported the highest faculty salaries for years, mainly because most professors are unionized.