The Best Colleges and Universities by Faculty Salary

By Dr. Ross Gulik
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Published: Sep 7, 2021
Updated: Sep 19, 2024Advertisement

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Key Takeaways

In the US, full-time college professors earn an average of $143,823 in 2021-2022. Those who work at private institutions even have higher annual earnings.
Adjunct and other faculty members (non-tenured) earn considerably less each year. Professor’s pay remains the same despite the rise in student costs and executive compensation.
The American Association of University Professors disclosed that the average full-time college and university professor, combining all instructor types and university categories, made $108,803 in 2020-2021.

Most rankings of colleges and universities look to factors that bear on the academic excellence of the faculty and of the research and instruction taking place at these institutions. Obviously, money plays a role here: schools with more money to spend, especially on hiring and keeping outstanding teachers and researchers, are more likely to offer a superior education.

What if we made money the sole criterion for identifying the academic quality of an institution? As it turns out, data from the (2018-19) Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education detail the salaries that colleges and universities pay their faculty (available at data.chronicle.com). It’s therefore possible to rank these schools by the salaries they pay their faculty.

The data on faculty salaries cover not only full professors, but also associate and assistant professors as well as instructors and lecturers. Since the senior faculty at an institution best define it, we therefore focused on full professors in this ranking of colleges and universities by salary.

If we simply ranked these schools by the average salaries of their full professors, we would be repeating a ranking readily available at the Chronicle of Higher Education and through the Carnegie Classifications. We repeat this ranking here, for the top 100 schools by salary, because it shows which schools are paying the most to their senior faculty.

Nonetheless, we also regard such a ranking as inadequate, even from a purely monetary perspective, because certain parts of the country are far more expensive to live in than others. The same amount of money earned from one school will go a lot farther than money from another school.

Thus, after ranking the top 100 colleges and universities simply in terms of average salary of full professors, we then rank the top 100 colleges by salary as corrected by the cost-of-living index by state. As we will see in this second ranking, professors incur quite a “prestige premium” for becoming faculty at elite schools.

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Let’s Talk Faculty Salary

There are three major ranks for college professors: full-time, associate, and assistant. During the first few phases of a tenure track, assistant professors are introductory, full-time professors who carry a terminal degree, while the full-time professors are at the senior level. Aside from these ranks, there are also full-time and adjunct, non-tenured faculty members, who are called instructors or lecturers.

The Average Salary of College Professors

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that the median annual salary of postsecondary professors is $79,640. However, the paycheck of every college professor will vary by institution, geographical location, degree level, field of degree, and academic rank. For instance, a law school professor with a JD degree who teaches graduate-level students is expected to earn more than a music teacher handling undergraduate-level students.

Best Colleges and Universities by Faculty Salary: Experience as a Factor

College professors with master’s degrees can teach at community colleges. But most four-year universities require a Ph.D. or any doctoral degree. Ph.D. holders also earn more money than those with a master’s degree.

It’s also important to note that part-time professors—commonly called adjunct professors—earn significantly less than traditional faculty instructors. They are paid by the course and usually work at two schools or more to make ends meet.

Adjunct professors are also not qualified for retirement packages and healthcare benefits a full-time, tenured faculty may receive. A 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers found that roughly 25% of these adjunct professors heavily rely on public assistance. Nearly 40% of these teachers attest that the pay they get in their jobs is barely enough to cover basic household expenses.

Average Salary by Type of Institution

Prestigious schools like Harvard University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University are almost synonymous with the highest paid graduates. Each college degree holder from one of these schools is expected to hold a top job title! College professors, who are known as the best in their field, are also expected to enjoy full time faculty salaries.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that teachers in private, nonprofit institutions earn more than their public counterparts. Those in a two-year or community college earn the least among all professors. This goes to show that the type of institution where a professor teaches influences the paycheck he or she earns.

As with online professors and on-campus teaching, there’s no notable distinction between them. Professors have fully adapted to providing their instruction both online and on-campus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic which required schools to go 100% online learning. Nevertheless, the salaries generally vary from school to school.

Average Salary by Subject

How much a professor earns will also vary based on the subject they teach. On average, the pay is between $64,000 and $123,000. The highest-paid teachers are those who teach law, taking home more than $120,000 each year, while the lowest ones are the education professors, earning less than $65,000 every year.

Highest Paying Alternative Jobs for College Professors

Aside from teaching, there are alternative jobs that might interest college professors. Educational leadership, for example, still allows you to work in academia and lead academic services or as a department head. Other options include:

Instructional Coordinator: Oversees teaching standards and the school curriculum. The average annual median salary of an instructional coordinator is $63,740.
Postsecondary Education Administrator: With an annual median salary of $96,910, education administrators are the ones that manage student services, academics, or faculty research, depending on the department they are serving.
Training and Development Manager: These managers work in non-academic environments directing, planning, or coordinating training programs of an organization’s staff. The annual median salary of this job is $120,130.

Job Outlook for College Professors

The demand for college professors is relatively faster than average, at (12% through 2030). The highest job growth is found in teaching health specialties like pharmacy, dentistry, public health, veterinary medicine, and therapy, while the lowest is for agricultural science professors teaching food, agriculture, and natural resources.

Which States Pay the Highest for College Professors?

Certain states across the US pay their college faculty more than others, on average, according to recent data from the US National Center for Education Statistics.

College professors in the District of Columbia take home the highest paycheck, averaging $115,372 across all institution levels and subject areas.

The same NCES data show that the top five states where professors full-time teachers on a nine-month contract in a degree-granting postsecondary institution earn the highest are:

Massachusetts: $112,141
California: $109,371
New Jersey: $109,290
Connecticut: $107,248
Delaware: $105,103

The Top Colleges and Universities by Faculty Salary (Unadjusted)

Jump to faculty salaries adjusted by cost of living

Rank	School	Type	Focus	Salary
1	Stanford University, California	4-year private	Research (highest)	$254,232
2	Princeton University, New Jersey	4-year private	Research (highest)	$248,252
3	University of Chicago, Illinois	4-year private	Research (highest)	$247,117
4	Yale University, Connecticut	4-year private	Research (highest)	$236,442
5	Harvard University, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$235,604
6	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$232,216
7	Columbia University in the City of New York, New York	4-year private	Research (highest)	$223,716
8	University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania	4-year private	Research (highest)	$223,693
9	University of California-Los Angeles, California	4-year public	Research (highest)	$216,977
10	Northwestern University, Illinois	4-year private	Research (highest)	$214,273
11	Georgetown University, District of Columbia	4-year private	Research (highest)	$208,442
12	California Institute of Technology, California	4-year private	Research (highest)	$207,794
13	New York University, New York	4-year private	Research (highest)	$205,079
14	Duke University, North Carolina	4-year private	Research (highest)	$201,860
15	Washington University in St Louis, Missouri	4-year private	Research (highest)	$201,104
16	University of California-Berkeley, California	4-year public	Research (highest)	$199,618
17	Rice University, Texas	4-year private	Research (highest)	$195,897
18	Vanderbilt University, Tennessee	4-year private	Research (highest)	$193,619
19	Dartmouth College, New Hampshire	4-year private	Research (high)	$191,230
20	Boston College, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$188,459
21	Boston University, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$188,274
22	University of California-Santa Barbara, California	4-year public	Research (highest)	$187,459
23	University of California-San Diego, California	4-year public	Research (highest)	$187,109
24	University of Notre Dame, Indiana	4-year private	Research (highest)	$185,719
25	Brown University, Rhode Island	4-year private	Research (highest)	$185,331

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This ranking of the top 100 schools by faculty salary correlates nicely with many standard rankings of the top colleges and universities (including our own custom college rankings). That should not be surprising. After all, it makes sense that the better schools would pay their faculty more, and that the better faculty would tend to teach and do research at the schools that pay them more.

Still, there are some interesting patterns in this ranking. Private schools tend to rank ahead of public schools, paying their faculty more, at least among elite institutions. Full-fledged research universities offering a range of doctorate degrees tend to pay their faculty more than top four-year colleges.

Thus the top-paying research university is Stanford, on average paying its senior faculty $254,000. But to get to a top four-year school on this list means going down to number 33 spot, which is Barnard College at $176,000. There are only 14 four-year colleges on this list, the rest being full-fledged research universities.

Interested in attending Stanford University or Harvard University? Find out how to get accepted into these top-ranked schools.

The Cost-of-Living Correction

The cost-of-living index indicates how expensive it is to live in one state versus another. To calculate the index, one computes the average cost of living across the United States, which corresponds to the number 100, and then one adds or subtracts how much less or more expensive it is to live in that state. The cost-of-living index is readily available online: see the one at World Population Review.

Jump to faculty salaries adjusted by cost of living

The most expensive state in which to live is Hawaii, with an index of 192.9 (which rounds up to 193). The state which is closest to the national average in cost of living is South Dakota, with an index of 99.8 (which rounds up to 100). So, for every $100 you spend in South Dakota, you would, on average, expect to spend $193 in Hawaii. It makes sense that Hawaii would be so much more expensive given that that just about anything except pineapples needs to be imported from the mainland.

For the purposes of this article, the cost of living indexes for California, New York, and Massachusetts become particularly important. Seventeen schools on this list are from California, thirteen are from New York, and fourteen are from Massachusetts. Their respective cost-of-living indexes are 151.7, 139.1, and 131.6. Other states with schools appearing on this list that have a high cost-of-living index include Washington DC (index = 156.5), Connecticut (index = 127.7), Maryland (index = 129.7), and New Jersey (index = 125.1). Together, these states account for almost 60 of the schools listed on the previous list.

Suppose now we divided all these average school salaries (and those now listed) by the cost-of-living index of the state in which the school is located. Let’s treat the cost-of-living index as a percentage, so dividing by it yields the effective purchasing power of a salary across the United States. Essentially, dividing by the cost-of-living index therefore indicates the adjusted salary that corresponds to what a school is effectively paying its senior faculty.

A cost-of-living index over 100 is therefore going to pull the effective salary down from the nominal salary (as it appears on the previous list). Schools in California and other states with high cost-of-living index will therefore drop considerably, some off the list entirely. On the other hand, states like Tennessee (index = 88.7), Georgia (index = 89.2), Texas (index = 91.5), Illinois (index = 94.5), Pennsylvania (index = 101.7) will see their top schools perform very well with this adjustment to salary.

The change in ranking of colleges and universities that results from adjusting raw salary by cost of living makes for a striking change in the rankings. The number one school on the unadjusted ranking was Stanford. It now drops to number twenty-five. California schools, of which there had been seventeen now drop to two. Other states with a high cost of living also show a precipitous drop in the rankings of their top schools. New York drops from thirteen to two schools, Massachusetts drops from fourteen to five. The number of colleges that rank in the top 100 when salaries are adjusted now drops from fourteen to seven.

On the other hand, states with schools having a low cost-of-living index now do very well. Texas, which on the unadjusted list had seven schools now has twelve. Illinois, which had three on the unadjusted list, now has seven. Moreover, two of its schools now land at the number one and number three positions (University of Chicago and Northwestern University, respectively).

Among the top ten in this adjusted ranking, big winners include Washington University (Missouri), Vanderbilt, Rice, Duke, Notre Dame, and Emory. The only Ivies to make the top ten are University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, with Princeton at number ten.

The Prestige Premium

What’s the lesson in all this? The lesson is twofold: (1) faculty are willing to forgo a significant portion of their real or effective salary in order to be associated with prestigious institutions (e.g., the Ivies and the big California schools, as in our first ranking); (2) schools that pay their faculty a higher effective wage are undervalued in conventional academic rankings and deserve a second look.

It seems that faculty take a cut in real or effective salary in order to be associated with a more prestigious schools, such as a Yale rather than a Vanderbilt or a Columbia rather than a Notre Dame. This cut can be described as a “prestige premium,” where the prestige premium offsets the loss of effective salary.

The contrast between unadjusted and adjusted rankings given above is instructive, and schools that do particularly well in the adjusted rankings deserve our attention, if only because faculty at these schools may be preferring real value over prestige. In fact, these schools probably deserve even more attention than our adjusted rankings suggest.

That’s because many of the elite schools are located in cities where the cost of housing is prohibitive, so much so that the cost-of-living index for the state doesn’t even begin to reflect the financial challenges of housing in those cities.

California may have a cost-of-living index of 151.7, compared to that of Illinois, which is at 94.5. But the two top schools in Illinois are in the Chicago area (University of Chicago and Northwestern University), and the median cost of a house in Chicago is about $291,000 whereas the median cost in Los Angeles is $883,000. In San Francisco it is $1,471,000. In Palo Alto, right next to Stanford, the median cost of a house is $3,325,000 (for these median housing costs, see BestPlaces.net).

At the very least, these rankings based on unadjusted and adjusted salaries are interesting. Certainly, they pick out schools that by any other standards are solid and noteworthy. Whether these salary-based rankings should affect where one decides to attend school as an undergrad or grad student is debatable. But it’s certainly additional information one may want to consider.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway, here, however is for prospective faculty deciding where to settle their roots. Raw or unadjusted salary (the first ranking in this article) certainly seems like an unreliable guide for choosing to take a faculty position at a school. The effective or adjusted salary (the second ranking in this article) is, we would suggest, better if financial considerations alone are in play.

Of course, especially at top-tier research universities, the main consideration for prospective faculty persons is to find a school and department where they can thrive and where they have close colleagues. But where two schools are equivalent on research potential and collegiality, choossing a higher effective or adjusted salary, especially in the face of the prestige premium, may be the wiser course.

One Chicago accountant noted that many of her clients who had gone to California returned to Chicago because “they got tired of using most of their income to service their mortgage.” The top schools on our adjusted salary list avoid paying undue homage to the prestige premium.Back to Top

The Top Colleges and Universities by Faculty Salary (Adjusted by Cost of Living)

Rank	School	Type	Focus	Salary
1	University of Chicago, Illinois	4-year private	Research (highest)	$261,499
2	Washington University in St Louis, Missouri	4-year private	Research (highest)	$230,889
3	Northwestern University, Illinois	4-year private	Research (highest)	$226,744
4	University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania	4-year private	Research (highest)	$219,954
5	Vanderbilt University, Tennessee	4-year private	Research (highest)	$218,285
6	Rice University, Texas	4-year private	Research (highest)	$214,095
7	Duke University, North Carolina	4-year private	Research (highest)	$212,708
8	University of Notre Dame, Indiana	4-year private	Research (highest)	$206,354
9	Emory University, Georgia	4-year private	Research (highest)	$201,209
10	Princeton University, New Jersey	4-year private	Research (highest)	$198,443
11	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Michigan	4-year public	Research (highest)	$195,866
8	Southern Methodist University, Texas	4-year private	Research (high)	$186,813
13	Yale University, Connecticut	4-year private	Research (highest)	$185,154
14	The University of Texas at Austin, Texas	4-year public	Research (highest)	$184,152
15	Harvard University, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$179,030
16	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts	4-year private	Research (highest)	$176,456
17	The University of Texas at Dallas, Texas	4-year public	Research (highest)	$175,242
18	Dartmouth College, New Hampshire	4-year private	Research (high)	$174,321
19	University of Virginia-Main Campus, Virginia	4-year public	Research (highest)	$173,326
20	Michigan State University, Michigan	4-year public	Research (highest)	$172,996
21	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina	4-year public	Research (highest)	$169,276
22	Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus, Georgia	4-year public	Research (highest)	$168,991
23	University of Miami, Florida	4-year private	Research (highest)	$168,628
24	University of Houston, Texas	4-year public	Research (highest)	$168,575
25	Stanford University, California	4-year private	Research (highest)	$167,589

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