I’m not fully convinced by the salary argument, especially with quality-of-life adjustment. As an example, let’s imagine I’m a skilled post-PhD ML engineer, deciding between:
Jane Street Senior ML Engineer: $700-750k, 50-55hrs/week, medium job security, low autonomy
[Harvard/Yale/MIT] Tenured ML Professor: $200-250k, 40-45hrs/week, ultra-high job security, high autonomy
A quick google search says that my university grants tenure to about 20 people per year. Especially as many professors have kids, side jobs, etc. it seems unlikely that a top university really can’t find 20 good people across all fields who are both good teachers and would take the second option (in fact, I would guess that being a good teacher predisposes you to taking the second option). Is there some part of the tradeoff I’m missing?
For a professor at a top university, this would be easily 60+ hrs/week. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings claims 61hrs/week is average, and something like 65 for a full Professor. The primary currency is prestige, not salary, and prestige is generated by research (high-profile grants, high-profile publications, etc), not teaching. For teaching, they would likely care a lot more about advanced classes for students getting closer to potentially joining their research team, and a lot less about the intro classes (where many students might not even be from the right major) - those would often be seen as a chore to get out of the way, not as a meaningful task to invest actual effort into.
Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.
Jane Street is a pretty extreme comparison. An easier one is that a good software engineer at Google can, in their late 20′s, make 2x what a tenured professor makes by the end of their career, with similar or better work/life balance. Tenure becomes irrelevant when you can retire by 40.
I’m not fully convinced by the salary argument, especially with quality-of-life adjustment. As an example, let’s imagine I’m a skilled post-PhD ML engineer, deciding between:
Jane Street Senior ML Engineer: $700-750k, 50-55hrs/week, medium job security, low autonomy
[Harvard/Yale/MIT] Tenured ML Professor: $200-250k, 40-45hrs/week, ultra-high job security, high autonomy
A quick google search says that my university grants tenure to about 20 people per year. Especially as many professors have kids, side jobs, etc. it seems unlikely that a top university really can’t find 20 good people across all fields who are both good teachers and would take the second option (in fact, I would guess that being a good teacher predisposes you to taking the second option). Is there some part of the tradeoff I’m missing?
For a professor at a top university, this would be easily 60+ hrs/week. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings claims 61hrs/week is average, and something like 65 for a full Professor. The primary currency is prestige, not salary, and prestige is generated by research (high-profile grants, high-profile publications, etc), not teaching. For teaching, they would likely care a lot more about advanced classes for students getting closer to potentially joining their research team, and a lot less about the intro classes (where many students might not even be from the right major) - those would often be seen as a chore to get out of the way, not as a meaningful task to invest actual effort into.
Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.
From where do you get the 40-45hrs/week number?
Jane Street is a pretty extreme comparison. An easier one is that a good software engineer at Google can, in their late 20′s, make 2x what a tenured professor makes by the end of their career, with similar or better work/life balance. Tenure becomes irrelevant when you can retire by 40.