Today I wanted to ask a simple, specific question: How does my salary relate to the amount of teaching that I do? Let’s take a look:
- I’m paid $105,000 per year, so with benefits I probably cost $150,000.
- Sabbaticals increase my cost by about 13%.
- An in-state student will pay $6500 in tuition for 26 credit hours of coursework during the 2012/2013 school year, or $250 per credit hour. A typical course is 3 or 4 hours and therefore costs $750 or $1000 to take.
- Putting these pieces together, my cost is equivalent to 680 credit hours of teaching per year.
In reality, I teach around 375 credit hours worth of courses in a typical year; definitely not enough to cover my salary. But what is the big picture? Here are a few other things to think about:
- My salary doesn’t come directly from tuition—it’s in the state budget, paid using tax revenue.
- Students who are not Utah residents pay approximately 3x more tuition.
- Grad student tuition is more expensive than undergraduate. However, a lot of grad students get tuition waivers.
- If I taught at an expensive private school, tuition would easily cover my salary. For example, a credit hour at Yale costs six times what it costs at Utah.
- Some professors teach quite a few more credit hours than I do, though many teach fewer.
- An instructor would typically teach many more credit hours than I do. Three of the four instructors employed by my department make less money than I do, but not by a lot.
- In a typical year, I bring in several times my salary in grants.
The interplay between state funds, tuition, and grants makes it hard to simply follow the money. This post doesn’t have a specific point to make, but I wanted to set the stage for a subsequent piece. State salaries such as mine are public information.
14 responses to “Economics of University Teaching”
That website says you make $165k.
Hi Robby, that figure includes benefits and summer salary. If you click on my name it gives the breakdown.
Neat. I make a little more, but (I guess) spent a little more on the local taxes and other things here and there (like houses in Chicago).
unless things have changed in the last 30+ years, i was under the impression that undergraduate tuition subsidized research, not teaching at large private universities.
Hi Mark, I honestly have no idea what subsidizes what around here, and would appreciate a pointer to a reference about this if you have one handy.
@Mark 4, John 5: In this context, are you defining “subsidizing” to imply a causal relationship? E.g., I guess the hypothesis “tuition subsidizes research but not teaching” would predict that over the past 10 years rises in tuition have tracked rises in the costs of research, while *not* tracking rises in the costs of teaching.
Personally (influenced by American political discourse) I think of the statement “X subsidizes Y” as simply what you get when you run the statement “X is profitable and Y is not” through an animistic-fallacy filter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animistic_fallacy).
Hi Arthur, I’m not sure how to define subsidizing, though I do know an invasive way to test for it, which is to separate the teaching and research missions into financially independent units. I could still work for both of these units (each would pay a part of my salary) but a financial firewall would make it clear where the money goes and comes from.
I have often wished we could build this kind of financial firewall between the athletic and academic programs at universities.
Hi Robby, I believe I’m at the low end of the pay spectrum for associate profs in CS at R1 schools in the USA. Not sure why, though it could simply be that I haven’t made myself obnoxious asking for raises, and also I got tenure in 2009 when there were basically zero raises to go around. Cost of living is certainly a factor. Also I feel lucky when I talk to faculty for example in humanities.
> In a typical year, I bring in several times my salary in grants.
Seems to make the “salary / tuition hours” calculation just fundamentally broken, though you’re using only non-summer pay, etc., right?
Hi Alex, I think it’s complicated…
As you know, 2/3 of the grant money gets spent directly by me, mainly to pay students. The remaining 1/3 goes into the university coffers and then is spread around in complex ways. A tiny bit of it comes back to me as “returned overhead” which is nice although the rationale for it has never made a lot of sense.
Here, a former dean from GA Tech says that universities lose money on sponsored research:
http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/
This seems to assume a $0 cost of all other intructional aspects of the university (buildings, academic advisors, A/V, registrar, adminstration, library, …).
Hi Sam, I’m ignoring those costs since I have no idea how to estimate their magnitudes. But certainly they would need to be factored into any realistic accounting.
Sure, the answer is an “it depends.” His #1 is a little tricky — how much teaching loads reduce varies a lot, and happens more heavily the more “research university” a place is, to my knowledge. Course buyouts at least are purchased with grant money, so they probably shouldn’t count against. Also, he seems to be counting humanities/nontechnical fields in here, where I do indeed assume it’s a mug’s game if money is your goal. I am less convinced in technical fields, at least in fields your university has a decent presence in, so payoff on proposal writing time isn’t bad. OTOH, only our accountants really know, if anyone.
Overall, I would not be surprised if 1) most universities lose money on research and 2) most lose money on sports. Doesn’t mean that Notre Dame football is a giant drain on the coffers, though I suppose I don’t know for sure.