if you really want hard numbers, pick your favorite public university. poke around. their faculty salaries will be public record. also, the student feedback on faculty will be public record. you should be able to figure out the average number of courses taught, and the average salary in about 10 minutes after you find the relevant excel spreadsheets.

a 3 credit hour course will involve at least 3 hours of work per week (you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in). a minimum of 1 office hour per week. you've got to come up with homeworks, and grade them. even if you look at 25 students' homework for only 1 minute each, that'll take about half an hour. so it takes 4.5 hours each just to do the bare minimum possible work for a class.

google for "average college tuition" to cover that part.

what's left?

The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part.

Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research.

From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

The fact that they also do research as a full-time job means that they're even less overcompensated (by which I mean, "more undercompensated").

Commuting time wouldn't be counted if we are comparing jobs in academia to jobs in other sectors of the economy.

average college tuition

Most students attending most colleges pay no more than list price for tuition, and at some colleges many students pay considerably less. (This fact, of course, partly goes against some statements in the original article, but it also goes against the statement in the grandparent comment that a student enrollment of x in a class necessarily generates a revenue stream for the college of x times the enrollment.)

That's why I'm asking for specifics. Someone here made factual claims. At least one of those claims is implausible to me (that any one professor develops massive revenue for his college by his classroom teaching activity). I base that on my college experiences, and on my current experiences in other teaching occupations. But with more specifics, we will all have a better sense of how comparable academic employment really is to other forms of employment.

even if there is distance teaching, you have to stop what you're doing, turn on your video conferencing program, and pretend to address the course material for 1 hour, as opposed to doing whatever else it is you want to do for that hour.

and even if a particular student is themselves paying less, any loans originated by non-university sources, or scholarships from outside the university, etc become university income. only grants, loans, work studies, etc, originated by the university itself wouldn't be new income.

so, yes, the average income per student will be less than the advertised average tuition, it will also be higher than what the average student is paying. (huzzah, upper and lower bounds!)

A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year B. Average course size: 25 C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10 D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000 E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000.

This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following:

Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.

This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.)

So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)?

For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.

The grad courses of course have smaller class sizes since they're the long tail of education, but that's not what we're talking about here. If you remove the courses with 0 undergrads, the average is probably not below 25.

From first glance, it looks like the median is quite possibly below 25, but the mean isn't, if you only look at undergraduate courses.

Also, professional schools have huge class sizes and charge tuition at the same or an even higher level.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection...

(Go to near the end of this long thread for the latest updated alphabetized list.)

The tuition revenue per professor indicated in the HN comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063

is simply too high. That was a wild guess, not a statement based on actually doing research.