A Rant/Calculation on Professor Salaries

Recently, I noticed someone had added a post on an old entry of TTR defending the salaries of law professors that are paid over $200,000. Their defense rested on two principal grounds: (1) the cost of living in the particular city (in this case, San Francisco) and (2) that they're exceptional teachers and "worth every penny."

It got me wondering what the actual "worth," in annual salary, of a law professor is. Considering what follows, I'd have to be convinced to pay one more than $100,000 given the current oversupply of qualified people for such positions and the fact that law schools are professional schools that exist for the public's benefit. And I'd only pay that much to retain someone who is outstanding and legitimately has other offers. To do otherwise, I think, is a disservice for institutions of "public benefit."

The hardest-working law professors I've come across teach two large lecture courses and a smaller seminar-level course over an academic year. Let's assume - to give the professors the benefit of the doubt - that they teach this schedule and that the large courses have 90 students and the smaller course has 20. That is 200 students total.

Let's assume that the two large lecture courses meet for 4 hours each week on average and that the smaller course meets for 3 hours a week. Assuming 15-week semesters, that's going to be around 165 hours a year of in-class instruction. Let's assume that the professor puts 3 hours of preparation into every hour of in-class instruction (considering their expertise and how the Socratic method works, this is probably excessive). Generous preparation time would add 495 hours.

There is also office hours. Let's assume the professor puts in 2 office hours each week for the entire year, which, from my experience, is fairly standard. That adds 60 hours. And then there's grading. To keep things simple, let's assume the teacher spends an hour grading each student's final exam or paper. That adds 200 hours of work for 200 students.

All tallied, that's 920 hours of work to teach three classes in an academic year. That may sound like a lot, but under normal labor conditions (40 hr/week), that's only 23 weeks. If you're a lawyer who works 60 hours a week, it takes you only need to work about 15 or so to get to 920.

At 920 hours, a professor that makes $200,000 is pulling in $217 an hour.

But wait! you may say. Professors also write articles and books! And they must attend faculty meets and are supposed to go to all sorts of events at the schools! Okay, sure, let's say there's two hours of meetings each week and that the professor spends six weeks each year writing things to build the college's reputation. That would add 344 hours and lower the per/hour taking to $158 an hour. In a world where some graduates make minimum wage selling t-shirts, I'm skeptical that complies with any definition of reasonableness.

A common claim made in defense of professor pay is that they could make more in the private sector. Well, even if that's true, so what? I'm sure there are lots of people who could make more doing something else. Most of our Congress could make more doing something else, but they all chose to do what they're doing. And it seems to me that being a law professor has numerous perks over private practice. I can't speak for everyone, but personally I'd sure as hell rather make $200k working 30 weeks a year in a fairly low-stress position than make twice as much working 60+ hours a week as an attorney.

You might argue that professors bring some level of expertise that is in short supply on the market. To me, this argument really only holds water for small, specialty areas of the law, like Military Law or Advanced Energy Law. I could legitimately see where certain areas like that are legitimately hard to find someone qualified to teach them. But for 90% of law courses, there's not really a shortage of "expertise." For first-year and some upper-level courses, there are literally tens of thousands of people produced every single year who are competent in the subject matter. There a slew of people with specialized knowledge in areas like copyright, environmental law, and constitutional law that are either unemployed or working outside of their area of "expertise." Explaining legal concepts isn't brain surgery (unless you try to do something stupid like reconcile the politicized Supreme Court's history into unified objective rules); that's why there are 10 gazillion study aides available for any given legal subject.

The only thing keeping the law schools from paying less and hiring the law school equivalent of SAT/LSAT tutors is that there remains a "prestige" in having Harvard graduates stock your faculty. Personally, since law school is professional training and not a philosophy-based institution, I think it's absurd that they run them the same way you would a liberal arts college, and were I in charge, I would definitely have a preference for hiring adjuncts who actually work, but that's just me.

All in all, I don't want to make a blanket claim that all professors are overpaid, but let's not pretend that most professors aren't benefiting gratuitously from an extremely fortuitous situation, where they're compensated at a favorable rate for doing a task where, in normal market conditions, there would be a significant oversupply of qualified applicants driving down wages. There is a reason professorial jobs are coveted like medieval salt; through devices like tenure and misplaced elitism they've basically rigged the labor market.

I would gladly teach Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Evidence, and Professional Responsibility at a Fourth-tier law school for $40 an hour, even in San Francisco. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Peter Keane makes 4 times as much (per GG's tax return cited on TTR) - if not more - teaching those pedestrian, run-of-the-mill courses. Plus, he gets to fly around the country and reap the harvest of being a "dean emeritus." And he regularly makes TV appearances. Golden Gate pays him significantly more than market rate even though I can practically guarantee you that no one goes to Golden Gate University Law School because Peter Keane is there. To me, that's economic silliness and a waste of money, but I don't fault Keane for rigging a sweat deal; I fault the "public benefit, not-for-profit" institution that pays him.

As for the cost-of-living argument, I can't take that seriously when professors are paid significantly more than the local average and the schools they work for expect their students to live on a fraction of that amount.

Finally, one can't help but ignore the role of escalating professor salaries in contributing to ridiculous tuition increases. While, again, I can't fault the professors for capitalizing on absurd conditions that pay them quadruple what the market would likely bear, I would have moral difficulties cashing an inflated paycheck from somewhere like Golden Gate knowing that my salary increase was partially paid for by loans that fourth-tier graduates will have an increasingly hard time paying back, all because I conned someone into thinking that an education from me was something special and worth paying four or five times the market rate.

If certain, patently-overpaid professors had any kind of a moral conscience that trumped their financial motivation, it seems to me that they would take voluntary pay cuts to aid their universities in providing their "public benefit" at a reasonable cost. But alas, as the last two decades have taught us, the education sector no more believes in the true "public benefit" than Microsoft or Alcoa. Non-profit or for-profit alike, those at the head-table will resource-grab as much as they legally can. Again, I can't fault professors for being human and wanting to exploit the mine for as much gold as possible, but I sure as hell can and will fault the system for giving them bigger pick-axes and carts.