> this would make their universities vastly less attractive to various incoming faculty

...but given the flood state of the academic labor market, still rather attractive.

I doubt they will have much problem finding people who are qualified to teach.

But it's going to make it more difficult to continue hiring people who are seen as some of the best in the world in in-demand areas.

> I doubt they will have much problem finding people who are qualified to teach.

There's some ambiguity there.

In my experience, it's not necessarily hard to find someone whose credentials match job requirements wrt. teaching. Finding a good teacher for an academic position can be quite hard though.

But will it affect their football recruiting?

That is the real question.

IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark comes to mind, and this scared tons of great faculty.

Even with tenure, you would need to be extremely passionate about education or research to go into academia in fields like software or mech/chem/EE. The opportunity cost is easily 6 figures/yr, for your entire career.

The hours are long, the pay is laughable, the kids are not alright, you must publish or perish...maybe these universities are intentionally selecting for professors who will have a high tolerance for abuse.

Note some good US universities pay entry-level FAANG salaries to assistant professors.

If you can negotiate a low teaching load, it might be OK in some cases.

Nonetheless, I agree with what you say. I'd add there is a ton of nasty politics, bullying, etc. which might be hard to avoid while you are on tenure track chasing tenure.

Please give an example of such a university?

According to levels.fyi, a typical entry-level FAANG job (L3 SWE at Google) pays $140k base salary.

An assistant prof. position at UCSD I was looking into was paying $115-145k to identical roles in the department.

I know Google has some other benefits, like stock and bonus. Plus, compensation will grow more rapidly. Plus, there are tons of high-paying SWE jobs, whereas good academic positions are scarce.

In Academia, it's hard to exceed $200k. Some professors often get $200-300k from consulting. But those I know that earn so much on side gigs are frequently gaming university IP rules.

Google L3 SWE total comp is $193k

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Salesforce&track=Soft...

Base salary is the wrong comparison. As you move up to higher levels and get stacking equity grants, the liquid stock vesting routinely becomes >50% of total comp at FAANG -- i.e. you have to look at total comp.

It's not even close to comparable. Also worth noting: as a PhD with assistant prof levels of experience, you'd typically join as L5 (source: myself), which has total comp starting at $365k according to levels.fyi

But don’t you have to live in the Bay Area? Or does Google pay those L5 salaries for remote? Because $365k is more like $179-$200k where I live. And you have to work 12 months of the year, no?

The opportunity cost is still likely 100k/yr for the rest of your life, even with the FAANG salary to assistant professors.

consider this: You can be a new grad, get hired at Apple, and earn an entry-level salary[0]. Let's say we won't include the bonus and you get 130k/yr. You colleague is a new grad and goes to a PhD program at Duke University[1] where they earn 33k/yr.

In your first year, your PhD program colleague earns 97k less than you.

From years 1-3, your average base pay will be 138k, and your PhD colleague earns the same wage. They now earn 105k less than you for each of those years. Your colleague is in the hole over 400k opportunity wise.

In your 4th and 5th year, you can expect to earn 141k on average. Your colleague, still making 33k/yr, is now making 108k/yr less than you. At the end of 5 years, your colleague has completed their PhD and is in the hole over 600k in opportunity cost.

Now your colleague gets an associate professorship position. This assumes your colleague is extremely lucky and does not go into a post-doc. They earn 115k [2] base at NYU. In your 6th year at apple you're still making that 141k. You're still out-earning them by 26k. Your colleague is on the tenure track, which can take 6 or 7 years. [3]. All that time you're getting more and more YoE, while their pay band stays relatively the same during this time. Let's say the opportunity cost is 26k over 6 years, so an additional 156k to their over 600k.

At full professorship at NYU, your colleague is earning 162k [4] after 5 years PhD + 6 years tenure track. You, an Apple engineer (probably senior at this point), with 11 YoE are earning 165k/yr [5] at this point. Your colleague has cost themselves 750k in opportunity cost, and you're still earning a bit more than them! A full professor may never catch up to the opportunity cost of academic track, salary wise.

tl;dr: EVEN IF you get paid 160k base as a full professor, your years of phd + tenure track associate professor salary will mean you will likely never, ever catch up with someone who new-graded at a FAANG and never left that circle.

0. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Software-Engineer-New... 1. https://gradschool.duke.edu/financial-support/tuition-fees-a... 2. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NYU-New-York-University-Ass... 3. https://www.beyondphdcoaching.com/academic-career/how-long-d... 4. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NYU-New-York-University-Pro... 5. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Senior-Software-Engin...

Great analysis and arguably much too conservative. But the assumption is that positions in industry are equally stable. In the world of startups not so much. And Google and Facebook making even FAANG look volatile.

That academia job is less stable. Bring in grants or go home. Compete with others to climb a pyramid that gets more and more narrow at the top.

Even if you are laid off at Google or Facebook, with those on your resume, anybody will take you, unless you are some weird incompetent fluke. If you didn't get a new grant, you'll have a hard time in academia. Good luck switching institutions once you are unsuccessful in the grant game.

I get your using glassdoor and citing sources, but it's even worse, because someone competent enough to go straight into an associate prof position after PhD would guaranteed be making more than $200k at 6 years tenure at Apple, probably closing in on $300k.

But then you have to work at Apple. One the one hand, that's the dream of many people. On the other hand, I had some experience with people who went for that $300k, and Apple chewed them up and spit them out. They were working on a "secret project" which we all know was the driverless car. Such a shit show according to those people, so I'm glad I turned down the job. I hear the project is in zombie mode these days but who knows.

If you can put up with living inside of a police state like Apple, then maybe that's for you, but academia is such a completely different environment from that (very open and all about collaboration), it's hard to put a $$ amount on what it would take for me to put up with that abuse.

If you have a PhD in CS and you get tenured track position immediately right after finishing grad school without doing any postdocs, then I guarantee you can make at least 200k/year in your first year at any decently big tech company.

I have seen people with 2-3 NIPS papers and a bunch more from other conferences failed to obtain assistant professorship, it's ridiculous right now.

I appreciate all the research you did, but you're missing several key aspects of how faculty are compensated that changes your analysis.

First, faculty salaries as reported are typically 9-month. There's an extra 3 months of earning potential for professors, where they are effectively free agents. They can spend that doing research, or any number of other activities. Or nothing

Second, professors own their work product. If you are a salaried employee at a corporation, everything you do on company time is owned by the corporation. If you try to sell your work product or take it to another job, you will likely be fired and/or sued. This is not true for faculty; we own our lectures and all the content we produce for our courses. We can take it and use it other jobs, sell it as a book, make it available for free, or anything.

Third, we own our own time off the job. I'm free to run a consultancy even though I'm employed full time as an academic. I can make as much as I want through that, and people are willing to pay what I want because of my degree and my affiliation with the institution I work at. I doubt Google will let you trade on being a Google engineer while working at Google. Indeed, most FAANGs have a clause in their contracts stating that they basically own all ideas you think of, whether on or off the clock. If you're willing to take their salary for that kind of trade, then you might think it's worth it. For academics, they think perhaps they will have a good idea one day and turn it into a startup or patent it, and many do.

Fourth, I have control over a lot of other people's money. So while I'm not paid a lot, I get to use millions of dollars in funding and equipment. If I move to another university, I can take my money and my project with me. I have hundreds of thousands of dollars of sensors and equipment in my office that I've bought over the years that I personally didn't have to spend a dime on, but which is pretty much entirely mine to use.

All this is to say that a straight comparison of salaries isn't going to get you the full story. For instance, is there any amount of money you can pay such that you can take 3 months off every summer, and still have a position in the fall? Do you have an office with a door? Do you have an assistant? Do you own what you work on?

> Indeed, most FAANGs have a clause in their contracts stating that they basically own all ideas you think of, whether on or off the clock

They can claim that all they want, but in California, that's not exactly true. What you do, on your off time, on your own hardware, that isn't related to a work project, is yours.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

This is good analysis, but this kind of analysis misses the point that money isn’t everything.

People pursuing the university research track may simply not be optimizing their years on earth to maximize their bank accounts.

Let's say that was true and I am calling BS on it as I happen to consult in higher ED at an Ivy. Would it be a problem if it was true that someone with a phd and 3 or 4 years of additional research experience were to make the same salary as a newb undergrad?

Note, where I consult, new 4 year grads get offers that often exceed the salary of their tenured professors.

I doubt that. What does UCLA pay entering STEM AI faculty?

FAANG salaries for MS in CS at or above $300k. Starting salary in genomics, stats, ML and AI in a very well funded medical college with PhD and 4-year postdoc is less than half that.

FAANG don't typically pay someone with just a masters in CS $300K fresh out of school, perhaps excluding someone in a very in demand niche. I didn't get that from my offers and I had a PhD from a good school. Maybe I just suck, but I compared notes with my peers, so we must all suck.

From what my friends got in academia and industry, I'd say at entry-level, professors at good schools are competitive with FAANG salaries, particularly when the cost of living is lower where the university is located. The raises and promos lead industry people to outpace them though because of the lower ceiling in academia.

Assistant professors (tenure track) in decent public business schools start at $300k salary. And this is in the Midwest. And I know that the top private business schools pay more, just that it isn’t public information like it is at the public universities. Now obviously those people would likely be paid higher salaries in the private sector (even CoL adjusted) but the economics of it ensures that pay for professors of fields in demand in the private sector will be at least somewhat decent.

What are those universities? In Pacific Northwest it's only 100-150k for Assistant Prof from what I've seen.

It’s specifically for profs in the business school, who are in very high demand from the private sector. For many other departments those figures are correct.

Since Texas is the topic: university salaries are public and used to be published in a Texas Tribune. A visiting professor at a Texas university, with probably no intention of tenure based on his career, was paid $340k/y back in the 2010s:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-creator-of-C++-Bjarne-Stro...

Of course he's not a nobody, but if Texas universities pay that kind of money to superstar professors, for small stints, this could attract people from industry that in the end are much more up to date on the industry's state of the art (vs the research state of the art).

The top 5 other professors (but probably many tenured) were making in the ~$200k range at that time too. In that part of the country, it's huge.

Ultimately tenure has a price. if there's no tenure, higher salaries would be offered.

Now the impact on student's tuition could be interesting, but if most of it goes to administrative staff anyways, who knows?

You might be able to cherry pick some outliers for sure. Just like at any company or institute. I can tell you from personal experience though that the going rate for a new hire full STEM professor with tenure at a prior institution was 95k at UT Austin in that time period.

~$200K is about starting comp for fresh graduates at a FAANG. When a fresh college grad can make more than a tenured professor, it's awfully hard to convince people to take that first rung into academia, where you're getting paid a lot less than $200K.

> Of course he's not a nobody

That's an understatement. He's one of the most famous names in computer science alive today. You can't look at the top 1% of 1% to make statements about the whole industry. $340k/year is a real TC range for no-name ICs at a FAANG these days.

The numbers you are posting are making the opposite point you are trying to make.

Throwing more money at professors' pay? Maybe, maybe not. Sounds like a political loser to me.

A good friend of mine is an assistant professor of CS at MIT. He is among the most premier researchers in his field. I'm paid about three times what he is paid working in industry. My wife is a professor of history at a well respected R1 institution. I'm paid like nine times what she is paid. If we compare my salary to the adjuncts at her institution, I'm paid more than 10x what they are earning. All this after the pay cuts for remote work.

Paying Bjarne a lot of money is not remotely representative of the state of academic salaries.

>Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark comes to mind

I could be wrong but I don't think it's correct

https://employment.ku.dk/tenure-track/tenure-track-at-ucph/

any links on that?

They call it like that, but you can be fired anytime, even if you are a full professor.

Ok I did some more research and I guess you're right although I haven't found anything exactly authoritative about what exactly it means

http://www.informationsordbogen.dk/concept_comment.php?cid=6...

https://www.forskerforum.dk/aktuelt/2022/august/tysk-forsker...

however in Denmark there is more protection in general against getting fired than in the U.S although not as much as other European countries, also a period when you've been let go you have severance, I think most I.T jobs are 3 months although I have seen some situations where it's 4 months. Maybe it's longer for academia.

In Engineering (especially robotics and ML/AI), it’s definitely not the tenure that’s making people apply for assistant professor roles. Almost everyone I met did it only because they want the freedom to pick the research direction and work on challenging problems. A few genuinely like teaching, but that’s about it.

> IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

This.

Even with tenure in place, I'd never go to academia. So much politics, worry about grants, immobility in what to do research in, low compensation compared to industry jobs, so much frustration, frustrated and bitter colleagues... It's terrible. I love working with colleagues that all have the best interest of the workplace in mind. I find that in industry a lot. In academia it's really rare.

The main edge is freedom in research topic (at least to the extent of what granting agencies are willing to fund), and freedom in publishing your ideas and results as you see fit.

Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now. Getting a tenure track position at a major research university in most fields if you do everything right is something like a 10% chance after multiple years of dreadfully paid and generally poorly treated postdoc. Then it's only 50/50 or so whether you get fired after ~5 years. You don't know if you will be tenured until you're pushing 40, and in bio you'd be lucky to know by then.

The EV of going for tenure these days is fucking awful. Besides, almost anyone capable of getting tenure in a STEM department at UT is super employable in the corresponding industry and definitely does not need tenure to protect their job like a random grade school teacher. The only place it's helpful is if you start really questioning people or pushing buttons, but that just goes back to intellectual freedom being the real perk, not the job security.

Might be different in something like ML where DeepMind and OpenAI can systematically take talent, but seriously the job market to get tenure track professorship currently is brutally competitive, to the point it is straining the whole academic system.

> The main edge is freedom in research topic

The way I see things, freedom is a consequence of tenure. Or at least it was intended to be like that. If you want to pursue ground-breaking ideas, you might not publish for a while. If you are tenured this doesn't matter much. If you aren't, it's like playing Russian roulette.

> Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now

In some systems, you are tenured right from the beginning. For example, in British Academia, assistant professor positions are tenured and it's not impossible to get one straight after your PhD. However, pay and funding is much lower.

I would think a top performer would like least the tenure system, as they're in demand but their job outlook stunted by (perhaps numerical minority) crusty elements that can't be supplanted.

The few people I know with tenure are just happy to be out of the academic grind, as it's absolutely brutal. Being tenured also doesn't lock you into a specific university- one of my professors had tenure but took a job elsewhere on a tenure track.

I would disagree but only, specifically, academia's already broken system. Tenure takes the heat off an academic such that they can deeply, deeply study a system. Academia's still stuck in lines-of-code style measuring sticks of performance so the rush to tenure is often pumping out salami slices worth of papers to secure future funds.

The thing that I don’t understand is that:

* Academics say publish or perish is terrible and produces warped incentives.

* Academics say they need tenure to protect senior researchers from the publish or perish system.

* But academics seem to be the ones building grant and advancement systems that enforce “publish or perish”.

I don’t get it - it certainly sounds like tenure mostly protects senior academics from systems they built themselves. If publish or perish is so bad why don’t senior members of departments build advancement opportunities that don’t rely on impact factor? Cynically, it almost feels like tenure is enforcing publish or perish, because those with tenure set the rules and the current system protects those who are tenured.

Furthermore, I don’t see why the sort of “deep study” research that the idealized tenured researcher does would need special protection. If the researcher has a track record of success surely the department would tolerate a brief lull in publications while they work on their Magnum Opus? Private industry frequently does multi-year deep research projects without the need for tenure systems.

I think your incorrect assumption is that tenured faculty are running and shaping the universities. Much has been written about the rise of different class in the academy: administrators. For a somewhat extreme position look here [1]. And even tenured faculty are subjected to the performance assessments that can seriously hinder their research agenda. As the saying goes: Tenure has never protected those who really needed it.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/05/10/kill-a...

Ahmen!

Really? The whole grind in academia for new hires is to get a job on the tenure track.

And even tenured UT or A&M professors will seek to move out to tenured positions elsewhere because no one wants to go down with a sinking ship. This is a singularly bad idea as Texas had successfully transitioned from being a resource extraction economy to a technology and medical one.