Thanks for giving some hard numbers. Your point about the cost of living in California is a good one: it is awful expensive, certainly you probably couldn’t live in the city (SF) for 40,000 a year. I think my response was very emotional simply because of the arrogance I see from folks who live off tax payer dollars. If no tax dollars go to paying your salary, or any professor, than I really don’t have a problem with how much you make. But tax dollars come from citizens, by force, and they directly impact my ability to live, and so I think they need to be treated in a very special way. Folks should not assume they are entitled to another’s money, just like you are not entitled to an other’s attention or time.

If all the money funding the UC system is given voluntarily, then I really don’t have a problem. Like any business, you should be paid by how much your customers are willing to give you for the value you deliver. In my experience in college, this concept was not practiced in that instructors where not held to an educational standards, like following best practices in education. So, from my standpoint as someone buying an “education”, what I valued was not delivered.

My values are certainly different from the folks in this web community, at least in a couple of ways. For example, you value the Federal research money a professor brings in: you use it as a measure of their performance. But, for me, you should not count money from tax dollars – federally or otherwise. If I’m taxed and that money is given to you, it doesn’t makes sense to turn around and tell me to be excited about the money you raised. Now, if instead you raised money from investment of citizens or organizations directly, people who willing commit their money to you, then it is something I think is valuable.

In one way, my anger comes from something specific: respecting customers. I wouldn’t yell at my customers for wanting to pay less for the same or better product, particularly these days with the economy so bad. In fact, I actively work to decrease the costs that go into delivering what my customers value, so that I can charge less. What makes me angry, is that _some_ folks don’t treat the tax payers with this same consideration. And if anyone should be treated with that consideration, it certainly is the tax payer, because the tax payer isn’t given a choice: they can’t opt out. I reckon I also encountered this as a student of physics: I was an irritation and not a customer.

All the best,
cvj

If you think $70K is a reasonable salary for a fully tenured professor living in Bay area, LA, San Diego or Santa Barbara – I would welcome you to investigate the cost of living issues (look at zillow.com for example).

I have many friends (former grad students friends of mine) who got PhD and now work on Wall Street – they were making $120-150K a year in their first year. Most assistant professors make $65-70K and it takes them 10-20 years to get to $100K – while Wall Street guys get 20% increases every year.

Sure, you can fire all big-shots and hire “professors” willing to work for $70K or even $40K a year – but the quality will suffer tremendously. Don’t forget that for every $1 that CA spends on UC system, the university raises $6 in federal funding. This means that spending $100K on that salary of a professor will bring $600K a year in federally supported funding. Does that make sense in terms of investment in CA economy? You tell me.

It’s complete garbage.

Of course, so is paying faculty over $100k. There’s such high demand for professorships (especially in non-technical fields), and there still would be if we lowered salaries 20% for profs that earn over 120k.

The question is whether this historical trend is in the state’s interest – that is, is this the right thing for the well-being of all Californians? If not, then the state legislature should find a way to reverse this trend, and that means raising revenue so be it. I cannot possibly comment on all the other state programs that are contributing to increasing the California tax burden but support for higher education is certainly not among them. The state budget summary tells a different tale than some of the comments above:

http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/FullBudgetSummary.pdf

curious: postdocs in experimental particle physics get about $50k a year, on average, I believe.

coolstar: The California tax burden, taking into account property, income, sales, and other taxes, is about average for the US. See the statistics at the Public Policy Institute of California: http://www.ppic.org. It’s a non-partisan organization.

I could almost accept the property tax rate caps brought about by Prop 13, since I intend to stay a long time. But I really think the 2/3 supermajority rule has got to go. Or, we can simply vote in more Democrats, though that seems unlikely.

More likely is that a movement will emerge for a “Prop 98″-like ballot measure next year, that would guarantee that the state spend a certain fraction of the general fund on higher education, as Prop 98 did for K-12 schools.

Now, another revenue killer has been all the tax breaks enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike, for everything from oil companies to adult book stores: see http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ross19-2009feb19,0,3825360.story. Perhaps some of them should be rescinded…it only takes a 50% majority to do so.

cvj, you’ve expressed eloquently the need for better education in California, or wherever you are from.

From Cali budget documents:

2000/01 Expenditures: $78.8B (General Fund) $99.4B (Total)
2001/02 $78.7B $103.3B
2002/03 $76.7B $98.9B
2003/04 $71.1B $99.1B
2004/05 Expenditures; $78.7B (General Fund) $105.4B (Total)
2008/09 Expenditures: $103.4B(General Fund) $144.5B (Total)

Or, graphically from 1998 shown against inflation and population growth,
page #3 of

http://www.dof.ca.gov/budget/historical/2009-10/governors/summary/documents/enacted/FullBudgetSummary.pdf

Also can read this which covers education and other locked in spending and its effects:

http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?_c=y0k2li16xl5ery&xid=y0dgall7be9art&done=.y0k2li16xlpery

Now, who is going to pay the tuition and stipend for those graduate students? Support them as they do field work? Buy and operate the equipment they need to analyze the data? Fly them to present their results and get feedback from the other world experts at major scientific meetings? Pay to publish their results in scientific journals, so that mankind can benefit from their efforts? All those require landing grants. At least in the sciences, many faculty bring in several times more money in grants than they are paid by the university. The university takes a hefty chunk off the top and most of what’s left contributes to the university’s programs. But competition for those grants is fierce, and the best researchers win way more than the “average” researcher. In many cases, the highest paid research faculty are actually generating a profit for the university, even after subtracting their large salary. Obviously, other universities would like to have these superstar faculty bringing them money, so the super-star faculty can and often do leave. And that’s why even public universities are willing to pay top dollar to hire and retain super-star faculty.

Yes, there are a few percent of older, tenured faculty who are not nearly as productive as they once were. But I can assure you that in all five departments I’ve been at, the fraction who become slackers is quite small. To the contrary, I’m amazed that many faculty are quite active in research, even after they’ve retired, are no longer receiving a salary from the university, and push on through poor health so that they can mentor one last graduate student.

As a successful science professor at a research university, there are things that I envy about the UC schools. However, I would not move to any university in California for a salary of less than $100k, even if the whole economic mess were suddenly solved. And I’m certainly not in the class of the highest paid faculty, even if we restrict our attention to the sciences (where typical salaries are way below that of fields like medicine, engineering, business and law. In those fields, the salaries are kept high because faculty can easily jump to industry where they will get even higher salaries.) If the UC system wants science faculty at my level or better, then their only choice is to offer top faculty competitive salaries. Otherwise, they will gradually accumulate more and more second or thrd-rate faculty who provide a second or third-rate educational experience to their students. Given the economic mess, that may be something that the citizens of California want to consider. But they need to understand the actual (and admittedly complicated) economics and the long-term consequences of their choices.

can someone tell me how me how much the average postdoc in particle physics makes in the US? Is it the same at all universities? How does it depend on experience?

thanks,

curious.