On Mar 26, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> Nicely caught, John! We've got relatively few academic superstars at
> the private universities in the six digits, and we've got a
> multitude of
> adjunct faculty making $27,000 per year (annualized load). The
> mean is
> a pointless statistic here.
I doubt it overstates matters by all that much. For the education jobs that the BLS does report median and mean for, the skew isn't all that huge <http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#b25-0000>.
And here's another BLS source (they do several surveys of employment and earnings, and I missed this one on first search <http:// www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#earnings>:
> Median annual earnings of all postsecondary teachers in May 2004
> were $51,800. The middle 50 percent earned between $36,590 and
> $72,490. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $25,460, and the
> highest 10 percent earned more than $99,980.
>
> Earnings for college faculty vary according to rank and type of
> institution, geographic area, and field. According to a 2004-05
> survey by the American Association of University Professors,
> salaries for full-time faculty averaged $68,505. By rank, the
> average was $91,548 for professors, $65,113 for associate
> professors, $54,571 for assistant professors, $39,899 for
> instructors, and $45,647 for lecturers. Faculty in 4-year
> institutions earn higher salaries, on average, than do those in 2-
> year schools. In 2004-05, faculty salaries averaged $79,342 in
> private independent institutions, $66,851 in public institutions,
> and $61,103 in religiously affiliated private colleges and
> universities. In fields with high-paying nonacademic alternatives—
> medicine, law, engineering, and business, among others—earnings
> exceed these averages. In others fields—such as the humanities and
> education—they are lower.
So yeah, there are some shitty academic jobs, but it pays a lot better than teaching kindergarten, like my sister-in-law, who's pretty strapped considering what important work that is.
Doug