When a story by Money magazine first appeared that ranked the best jobs to hold in America, I was distracted with trying to figure out if my taxes had been accepted by the IRS and by the state of NY (electronic submission). But I ran across this piece again and I have been scratching my head ever since regarding their assertion that being a college professor is the second best job that one could have in America. [image: Money magazine]
Don't get me wrong; I wish to be a university biology professor because, despite everything, I still think it is the best job for me, but I never have engaged in that particular fantastical belief that being a college professor is a truly wonderful job for most people out there, all things being equal.
This made me wonder how Money magazine made their choices for their listing of the "best jobs in America"? According to them, these are their selection criteria;
Using Salary.com compensation data, we eliminated jobs with average pay below $50,000; total employment of less than 15,000; dangerous work environments; or fewer than 800 annual job openings, including both new and replacement positions.
Next we rated positions by stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field. [italics mine]
If they think that it is "easy" to enter and advance as a professor in academics, well, I ask them, easier than what? Easier than taming a hungry lion with only a whip and a chair?
Of course, this, combined with their estimate of the average annual salary (higher than I would expect, based on what I have learned from colleagues about their salaries), made me curious to know what sort of jobs that the people at Money magazine considered to be real college professorships, and discovered that their criteria are rather peculiar. In addition to the obvious choices (college and university professors), they also included;
[this] category includes moonlighting adjuncts, graduate TAs [Teaching Assistants] and college administrators.
Hello??
As far as I am concerned, there are few useful comparisons to be made between college administrators and tenured faculty, and even fewer useful comparisons to be made between college administrators and TAs and adjunct professors. Honestly, I have never, ever met an adjunct professor who hasn't gone hungry at least a few times during their time as an adjunct, especially those who are single and have no other means of $upport outside of their own wits and will. Further, unlike tenured faculty and administrators, adjuncts have no sick pay, no paid vacation, no bonuses nor reimbursements, no job security and their access to health and dental insurance is sporadic, at best. Additionally, many adjunct instructors are not provided offices nor with desks, and they have very limited access to telephones, computers, and copiers -- all of which are necessary to properly do their jobs.
Further, as a former zoology TA, I know that TAs generally do receive medical and dental insurance (although they often have to purchase it using their meager stipend) and they are provided with other forms of support, such as a desk, but science TAs typically earn $16k per year, and they are not allowed to hold an outside job to help make ends meet. I have no idea what TAs in other fields earn, but I'd be willing to bet that it ain't pretty.
So I find it insulting to mention administrators in the same breath with either adjuncts or TAs, since administrators' primary function, in my experience, has been to find the most expedient way to screw over these two aforementioned groups as efficiently and judiciously as possible. This "penny wise and pound foolishness" is, after all, part of the reason that administrators are paid those "paltry" six and seven digit salaries. Or so I have been told "unofficially" on several occasions by people who know such things.
And to predict that there will be a 31% growth in academics in the next ten years is the epitome of irresponsibility. Where will this growth occur? Are they including academic positions that might be available overseas? Or -- more likely -- perhaps they are predicting that TAships and adjunctships will increase in the next ten years? If the latter situation is the case, then the average income for "college professors" will certainly plummet below Money magazine's "average $50k per year minimum" selection criterion because few, if any, adjuncts and no TAs earn even half that annual income.
So how Money magazine decided to include all these disparate groups together as "college professors" is beyond me. Even though some of these jobs are superficially similar, there are gross inequities between them that are obvious even to the casual observer, inequities that are easily and readily exploited. This silly report only reflects the astonishing lack of knowledge on the part of the editors of Money magazine about the moderne academic hierarchy and its inherent treacheries.
Needless to say, I think this article was completely disingenuous and only serves to add to the flood of misinformation available out there regarding academics and education in general. The least that the publishers of Money magazine could have done was to print that article on toilet paper so it would be more useful to their so-called "college professors" as well as to the general public.
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Unbelievable.
Rock on Grrl. What also galls me are the grades they give for stress (should be a C/D) and ease of entry (clearly should be an F).
The whole concept of "best jobs" is bizarre. Some people's ideal jobs (actor, teacher, professor, public speaker, politician) are my nightmares. My dream job (collections manager) would bore more people to tears (I am told that most people like "human interaction" on the job).
I agree that that's definitely a rosy view of professorship, especially wrt to money and competitiveness. I'm thinking that average salary is heavily skewed by administrators (how exactly do TAs fit their criteria? TAs in nonscience fields are paid dirt even compared to the $16-25K stipends in science).
Their average salary for writers is a joke, too. All of their average salaries are weird--did they just rule out the individuals who make under $50K per year as "not really x professionals?"
Wow, are they out of touch, or what?
I was sure you were going to say that being a "prof" at a JC or some place like DeVries was part of their category, and maybe it is. But who considers that academia?
Thanks for writing this. I'm a postdoc right now in ecology/evolution and make a fairly decent salary since I'm paid via NSF fellowship. But I know for a fact that I make more now than my PhD advisor's starting salary! I am skeptical that they could have possibly included TA salaries in these calculations since I had many, many friends in humanities and social science programs that made less than $12,000 with no health care. Of course the high salaries of those administrators could off-set that. Did they report standard deviation or medians for the average salary? And while the job of a professor may seem flexible I know plenty of post-docs and junior faculty who work all the time to the exclusion of any personal life. That's not what I call stress-free!
Any "study" that lumps together TAs, adjuncts, professors, and administrators; computes an "average salary" without reporting things like median or standard deviation; and calls the category "college professor", isn't worth the time or hard drive space it took to assemble the "data". Can you imagine what a set of peer reviewers would say?
We on the inside of the ivory towers know how wildly diverse those ranges of jobs and salaries are; what's sad is how very little insight that the number Money slapped on it, offers to anyone outside of academia. Or even, to those of us on the fringes.
Gosh, I sure hope those 95,300 new jobs come soon. After receiving exactly zero academic job offers in this year's cycle, I'm counting myself lucky that my department will probably allow me to postpone my defense a year and give me a few more quarters of TA support.
Someone seriously needs to put those Money writers in touch with a clue.
What I want to know is: how wrong are all their other rankings, based on what we know about this one? Can we trust any of their evaluations?
Gah. This is very similar to how school districts inflate their numbers by adding admins into the salary calculations, so that it looks like "teachers" are making an average of $15,000 more than they actually make while the admins are raking it in.
as an unemployed "professor" with no $afety net outside of the world's oldest profession, i'd really like to see a little real growth in the field, too.
Really, who comes up with that kind of stuff? It really amazes me.
It's been my experience that ANY TIME you know first-hand about something that's being reported, you'll find that it is distorted or leaves something out. It's scary.
Well, I kind of consider that academia. Like most things, it depends. I'm a faculty member at a community college. All of my colleagues have master's degrees or doctorates (more of the former than the latter). Some of us have published research, but we're not a research institution. However, we do a pretty good job of our primary mission, which is teaching. Our transfer students perform as well at four-year institutions as those who enrolled at those institutions as freshmen. My students have gone on to all of the UC and CSU campuses in California as well as Stanford, Caltech, and USC, so that's not bad.
Yes, we don't represent the quintessence of academia, but we're a pretty important junior component of it.
That said, the Money report we're discussing is pretty shoddy. What lousy research!
Honeybee: No, you really can't (at least judging by the fields where I've researched the salaries and other studies). Then again, pretty much every estimate I've seen of "starting salary" in the fields I've looked at estimates $10-20K/year above actual starting salary/benefits, judging by job postings.
My undergraduate college's second- or third-highest-paid employee (after the president and, some years, one professor) is the hockey coach. I've looked at their tax returns; he's listed as a "professor," although he holds an MBA and has never, to my knowledge, taught a class (even in the sports science department!).
The definition Money is using makes me think of that.
Okay the article is completely ludicrous. If for no other reason than for the stress and flexibility. But, in it's defense the number of jobs probably will be increasing. Many faculty are baby boomers and will be retiring in coming years. There are fewer people to fill those shoes and the outlook should improve. That said going from 200 applicants per position to 100 probably doesn't seem like an improvement. And for salary, I don't know about humanities, but keep in mind that many academic salaries are reported on 9 or 10 month contracts, but are supplemented with grant money in the other months. The average at my PhD institution and the offers that I received and accepted was just above 6 figures if you look at the 12 mo (with summer support off grants). Not bad!
Of course, including TAs in the average is ridiculous even the best paid didn't make above $25K.
Why? Twenty years ago professors promised their grad students that they could have it all because of the imminent wave of retirements, but after the wave, departments hired adjuncts or shrank instead of starting a wave of tenure-track hiring.
Your article has been featured in the Festival of Job Hunting #1.
I would appreciate if you can link back to carnival when you have some time.
Thanks for participating.
Regarding this article's accuracy and quality: job #1 is "software engineer". Need one say more?