WSJ Op-Ed: Faculty don't really work all that hard

[polly_mer]

The article is behind a paywall, but Inside Higher Ed has an overview at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/22/when-misleading-op-ed-wall-street-journal-irks-academics-its-time-fact-check-faculty.  The short version is that a long-term tenured professor is stating that professors are significantly overpaid ($200k/year is not uncommon) for six months of work per year at less than 40 h per week.  Thus, this person proposes making college free to students by paying faculty per hour, presumably only for hour teaching/prepping/grading.

But then there are the facts about how much full-time professors are actually paid, and how much work they do. Epstein says it's "not uncommon" for professors to make $200,000 per year, but a more accurate statement would be that it's not uncommon for professors to make that much at private, independent doctoral institutions.

<snip>
How much do academics actually work? It varies. And it's fair to say that academic life entails more flexibility than some other fields. But 50 to 60 hours a week is a good estimate. A small research project at Boise State University in 2014, in which faculty participants tracked their hours, for example, found that professors work 61 hours per week -- more than 50 percent over the traditional 40-hour workweek.

<snip>
Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who studies the faculty, said Epstein's essay "is almost absurd in its lack of accuracy," starting with the lack of actual full-time salary data. And "the idea of getting paid hourly just to get a fair wage definitely resonates with adjunct positions," she said. "They honestly would be paid better if they got an hourly wage rather than a lump sum of $3,000 on average to teach an entire class."

Reference: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/22/when-misleading-op-ed-wall-street-journal-irks-academics-its-time-fact-check-faculty

[downer]

These things are pretty hard to quantify. I suspect that there is not just variation, but extreme variation. Both among different schools, different areas of study, and within individual departments. There's also the question of what counts as working. I know a dept chair who sits in his office and watches jazz videos on youtube. Who knows how hard other people are really working, and how efficient they are being? Well some people publish 2 books a year, so they must be busy. There are many faculty who are obsessive about their work. But I've seen plenty of senior faculty who give the appearance of working very little and accomplishing even less.

But I'd say the same is true for plenty of other professions. I see school crossing guards who spend all their time sitting in their cars. The road repair crews I see seem to be spending a lot of time doing nothing. Do lawyers really work all the hours they bill? I don't think so. Are the people in HR always busy? I don't get that impression. A lot of jobs involve sitting around doing nothing for significant periods of time. Faculty have the advantage that they can generally do their sitting around at home. Sure it is a sweet deal. I'd welcome some faculty being made to work harder, but I hardly think that there are huge savings to be made from this proposal.

[pigou]

Factual errors aside, the real question is: "overpaid compared to what?"

Starting salaries at Google and Facebook in my field are $150k+ for someone straight out with a PhD. Higher if you go into finance. People with a Master's in machine learning or AI are looking at similar starting salaries (or they join startups with the potential of a massive payout). I talked about this with a lawyer friend of mine and she thought even that was underpaid: the starting salary where she works is $200k straight out of law school and it comes with (considerable) automatic, annual increases.

Not that everyone gets these jobs, but they're far less competitive than tenure track academic positions -- never mind getting tenure. And while even full professors are likely stuck flying economy class no matter the distance, the private sector pays for business class (or first/private, once you're further up the chain).

Yes, if you have a tenured (or even tenure track) position, you won't be living in poverty (at least in my field). Because you're a professional with valuable skills. Don't get me wrong: the academic life has many perks that I wouldn't want to give up. Not many jobs let you pursue whatever questions you're interested in and provide you with the infrastructure to do that with generally little need to justify what you're doing. But none of that does you any good if you spend all day worrying about how you'll pay the bills.

[Antiphon1]

Oh, please.  This is yet another slap at us egg heads who do their work between their ears rather than by the sweat of their brows. 

I'd be much more interested in a study looking at work task allocation and salaries of managers in service industries compared to professors in all institutions.  Besides, full professors making $200,000 plus is pretty much limited to a handful of disciplines at a very few schools.  Given the author, this may be a guilty dog barks first situation. 

[Parasaurolophus]

Maybe a few full professors in my field at Princeton/Harvard/Yale make 200k. Maybe. But the highest salaries I know of in my field go to people who are among the top 5 researchers in their subfields in the world, and they're earning around 130-150k.

For my part, the most a faculty member can earn at my institution is ~67k USD, in one of the most expensive cities on the continent.

Aside from that, I don't have much more to say. It doesn't seem worth the effort, really. Except maybe for this:

Under proposed free higher education plans, then, Epstein says, "perhaps it would make sense to pay university teachers by the hour, with raises in the wage awarded by seniority. Surely they could not complain." After all, he continues, "the two most common comments (some would say the two biggest lies) about university teaching are, 'I learn so much from my students' and 'It's so inspiring, I'd do it for nothing.' A strict hourly wage for teachers, as free university education may require, would nicely test the validity of that second proposition."

Validity is a property of arguments, not of propositions or statements. Bit weaksauce for an emeritus English prof to screw that up. Maybe he should have taught more comp (properly).

[eigen]

The "how many hours do people work" is hard to measure, but "$200k is not an uncommon salary" is both easy to measure and demonstrably false.

That salary is well above the 90th percentile for faculty salaries in the US, making it definitively an "uncommon" salary.

It's also very important to separate grant (summer) salary from yearly 9-month salary in these cases, since the argument is usually about what the *school* pays the person, not what they're getting paid as (effectively) a freelancer for the summer time.

[fast_and_bulbous]

Have you seen what business professors and engineering professors make? Computer science isn't so bad either. Some of them are easily six figures out of the gate even at middling institutions. "What the market demands" and all that BS. And I'm not slagging on any of those fields, it's just that it's not even close to being "fair" and people's own perceptions are going to clouded by their own experience. You can look up salaries online if you know where to look at most public institutions. I recommend a bottle of whiskey by your side when you do that, especially if you are an English or History professor.

There was a crusty old son of a beanbag in the earth sciences I had to deal with at my former institution who made $147k for sitting around and doing nothing but stirring shit up at faculty meetings, basically. This institution had a strange clause where you could be re-promoted ever 5 years - as if you are applying for full over and over again, and getting a nice 8k or so salary bump. He worked the system until he couldn't work it anymore, and then retired the year I left when we denied that son of a beanbag from his umpteenth "promotion".

But, that is an anecdote. The vast majority of faculty do not make that kind of money.

So, I say: Screw all those a-holes slagging on faculty. The WSJ can eat a bag of dicks. I'm so very tired of that narrative. Most faculty work 60 hours a week anyway and are banging away during the summer as well. A few abuse tenure, but they are the minority. For the credentials we have many of us could easily make 2-3x more in industry - and probably work fewer hours.

GRRRR.

[eigen]

Have you seen what business professors and engineering professors make? Computer science isn't so bad either. Some of them are easily six figures out of the gate even at middling institutions. "What the market demands" and all that BS. And I'm not slagging on any of those fields, it's just that it's not even close to being "fair" and people's own perceptions are going to clouded by their own experience. You can look up salaries online if you know where to look at most public institutions. I recommend a bottle of whiskey by your side when you do that, especially if you are an English or History professor.

From CUPA-HR data, even the median at top-research institutions doesn't hit the claims of 200k+, especially if you're not counting grant contributions to salary.

https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=46

Comp Sci has a 145k median for full professors at R1 institutions, and Engineering (broadly) is $141k median. Business is the highest at $169k for full professors at R1 institutions, followed by Law at $163k.

Sure, there are some senior faculty picking up 200k- especially the ones supplementing salary with earnings from companies they've spun off, patents, summer salary from grants and consulting work. But that isn't their stated salary.

[mouseman]

I guess that they want to contrast that to the hard physical labor performed by the hedge fund managers and bank CEOs and CFOs who are the main readers of WSJ.

Seriously, this is deflection. I'm sure that some new scandal will surface in which the top people at some corporation have run it into the ground, and are walking away with a $20 million bonus. But who cares about things like Enron, we know that poverty is the result of the actions of a bunch of Godless Perfessers, Sucking The Blood Of The Common Man, While Doing Nothing But Teaching One Class A Year And Publishing "Research" That We All Know Is Nonsense.

It serves two purposes. First, as i wrote, it deflects attention away from the 1% who are collecting an increasing share of the country's wealth, and second, it serves to discredit any study which proves that the Rich And Powerful generally have not reached where they are through their own personal efforts, but because of multi-generational manipulation of laws and control of access to opportunities.

So when a study comes out of Yale which demonstrates that the same few families have been controlling a huge proportion of the wealth, or that upward mobility has screeched to a halt, the people who pay the salaries of WSJ writers will point to this Op Ed as a "proof" that the Yake study is not to be rusted, because it is the Eggheads themselves are the ones who are taking the money away from The Honest Working Man.

[egilson]

I'm really sorry that my hemorrhoids and my septic system together prevent me from putting the Wall Street Journal to its most appropriate use.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'm really sorry that my hemorrhoids and my septic system together prevent me from putting the Wall Street Journal to its most appropriate use.

Oh, don't sweat it. The paper's as soft as the "journalism".

[ciao_yall]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

[ciao_yall]

I'm really sorry that my hemorrhoids and my septic system together prevent me from putting the Wall Street Journal to its most appropriate use.

Oh, don't sweat it. The paper's as soft as the "journalism".

I finally cancelled my subscription of 20+ years when they published an Op-Ed complaining about the metric system.

[phattangent]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

Well, I think I just found the most depressing observation in this thread. I hope this isn't anyone's actual (attempted) reasoning. :(

[RatGuy]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

Well, I think I just found the most depressing observation in this thread. I hope this isn't anyone's actual (attempted) reasoning. :(

About a year ago, a financial aid officer at a local HBC said of freshman composition: "How difficult is it to teach that class? A monkey could do it." She no longer works for that HBC. Many of her critics did in deed think she said that since "anyone" could be an English professor, those profs are overpaid.