How Much Do Professors Make?

The Collegiate Times, the school newspaper of Virginia Tech, has a database showing faculty salaries from a number of schools including all three of my alma maters (Virginia Tech, University of Florida, and George Mason University). You can search through the database here.

A few insights I found while combing through some data:

1. Econ profs tend to do just as well as engineering and computer science profs.
2. Business school and law school profs do even better.
3. A number of profs make less than I would have guessed.
4. A few profs make much more than I thought.
5. Most profs don’t make enough to get rich, but make more than enough to have a comfortable lifestyle.
6. My lifetime earnings probably would have been higher had I stayed in engineering. (I was already making more than many profs when I left.)
7. My difference in expected lifetime earnings is small enough that I don’t regret the decision to come back to school one bit.
8. Contingent upon getting an academic position after graduation, I will likely retire years later than if I had stayed in engineering, mitigating reduced lifetime earnings and having positive health benefits as well.

Needless to say, as an aspiring academic, this is some interesting data.