Assistant Prof Salaries

For those among you unversed in academic titles, the rankings go from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to Professor (sometimes called full professor, and this sets aside lecturers and the like). Promotion from assistant to associate usually includes tenure, though a handful of overachievers will seek promotion two years early to get the salary bump and then make us read their packages again for tenure. Academic asses.

Anyway, the 2015 salary data are out and I'm looking at the UGA slice, playing with job titles and salaries and all the rest. I listed the Top 20 UGA salaries earlier. In this post let's look at the very public data and the assistant professors who make, well, a lot of money compared to certain full professors in journalism who write a blog and can afford to be bitter about such stuff.

By my count there are 16 assistant profs who make more than $200,000 a year, roughly double my overly generous full professor salary. Three are tied for #1 with exactly the same salary. Yes, all three are in the Terry College (business school) and all make, according to the state salary data, $262,474.80. Yes, the same exact amount, even down to that last 80 cents. Go figure. Best I can tell, all the very top assistant profs are in Accounting. Better pay than H&R Block, I suppose, even in income tax season. 

Indeed, every assistant professor who makes over $200,000 a year works in the business school. Yup, every single one. 

Sheesh.

I could plop their names here and engage in a little salary shaming. It is a public record, after all, but hopefully they're embarrassed enough come payday. After all, the average assistant professor pay at UGA appears to be about $83,000, give or take. This number is fuzzy as it lists any and all assistant profs in 2015, even those who left. For example, the lowest salary is $1,384 and we know that makes no sense.

On another post I'll list the top salaries for faculty who do not have some administrative duties, such as department head or dean, etc. Those? They're in the mid $300k range. Yeah, scary, and I even vaguely recall one of them complaining on a different discussion board last year about how the lack of competitive salaries at UGA. Dude. Just stop.