Which colleges pay professors the most?

Average professor salaries rose only 1.7 percent last year, but five U.S. colleges pay their average lecturers $200,000 or more, according to a new survey.

The annual report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) says that professors hired by Columbia University in New York are the best paid in the country, with an average salary of $212,300 a year. Stanford, the University of Chicago, Harvard and Princeton all follow as the best paid examples in the industry.

The survey results (.pdf) are based on responses from over 1,100 public and private colleges in the United States. As expected, many of the best-paid professors come from Ivy league institutions. The highest-paying public university is the University of California, Los Angeles, granting professors an average of $167,000 per annum.

The average salary for a professor in the U.S. is $47,500.

However, the report does note that these figures might be misleading, as over three-quarters of faculty members are hired on a contingency basis -- and so are hired per course rather than being placed on full contracts. According to the AAUP, the majority of staff are hired on an average rate of $2,700 per three-month course.

AAUP director of research and public policy John W. Curtis, the lead author of this year's report, says "the news this year is not all gloomy, but the silver lining is not exactly gleaming, either." While some professors enjoy a healthy salary, there is a rising trend in contingent contracts -- whether as full-time faculty members, part-time faculty members, and graduate student employees.

"Part-time faculty members rarely have access to benefits from their academic employers and have little or no job security, despite graduate degrees and years of experience," the report says. "The lack of support they receive from their institutions translates into a lower-quality educational experience for students: even the most dedicated and well-qualified faculty members find it difficult to challenge their students to exceed when they themselves are scrambling to piece together a living."

Via: Huffington Post

Image credit: Flickr

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com