There are a number of factors that students and parents focus on during the college search process; many are rather meaningless (e.g. student/faculty ratio), while others are somewhat unknown. Faculty salaries are one area that few consider (mostly because it’s not widely reported information).
In theory, spending the most on professors means you attract the best professors – the ones with the best credentials, the best connections, the best reputations. So which colleges spend the most on professors? Here’s the Top 10 Universities/Colleges ranked by average professor salary.
Now, that list isn’t very useful because, as you may have observed, that’s also a list of the some of the biggest research universities in the world (all are categorized as “very high activity research”). So those high salaries reflect a lot of highly paid researchers who aren’t going anywhere near an undergraduate class. As one Harvard student was reported as commenting in the New York Times:
“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” a Harvard senior and a Rhodes scholar told the Times’ reporter. “You go to a liberal arts college for teaching. You come to Harvard to be around some of the greatest minds on earth.”
Research universities focus on mostly science research and mostly graduate education – which is substantially funded by undergraduates. There are some good reasons to attend a research university, but if you want great teachers in classes of fewer than 400, you probably don’t want a research university.
So, what are the top non-research universities in professor salary? Here you go:
