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Where the Living Is Easy.Navigation: Main page Author: Fogg, Piper Section: THE FACULTY
When strong salaries combine with low costs,professors can live the good life No one is surprised that the best-paid professors are at the richest and most prestigious private institutions in the country. And it is no surprise that many of those institutions are located in the country's most expensive cities: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Washington. Getting paid well over $100,000 may seem like the dream of every graduate student pining for a faculty job. (The national average salary for a full-professor is just under $95,000.) But if houses in the neighborhood near the campus start at $800,000, that salary is not so luxurious. This year, with new data from the American Association of University Professors' annual salary survey, The Chronicle used the cost-of-living index created by Accra, a national group of chamber-of-commerce researchers, to put those salaries in perspective. The index of more than 300 places sets the national average at 100. Fittingly, Normal, Ill., the home of Illinois State University, is right at the cost-of-living average. Full professors there earn an average salary of $76,700. That may not sound so great. But consider this: The average salary for a full professor at New York University, a whopping $144,000, works out to just $70,000 once the high cost of living in Manhattan is figured in. So where does the professorial dollar stretch further? The Chronicle highlights a few universities where the money is still good and the living is a whole lot cheaper. HIGH SALARIES MEET HIGH PRICESMany of the nation's top research universities are located in the nation's most expensive cities. The chart below shows professors' salaries in 2005-6, adjusted to account for the high cost of living. Accra, an economic-research group, sets the national average for this cost-of-living index at 100. • AN ANALYSIS of faculty salaries for 2005-6, with listings of the average salaries of faculty members at more than 1,400 institutions, begins on Page A14. Rice University, Houston
On the surface, says Jon Kimura Parker, Houston seems to have little appeal: The landscape is flat, the climate is muggy, and sprawl is ubiquitous. But when he moved there from New York City five years ago, he realized how far he could stretch an academic salary. "The dollar goes a lot further in Houston," says Mr. Parker, 46, now a piano professor at Rice's Shepherd School of Music. "It's an absolutely staggering difference." That has made it a lot easier to overlook some of the city's downsides. With the proceeds from selling what he calls a "really tiny" three-bedroom apartment on New York's Upper West Side, he and his wife were able to buy not only a small house in Houston, three blocks from Rice's campus, but also a second home in Washington State. They also bought two cars. The professor parks in front of his campus office, paying less than $200 a year for the spot. In New York, where he was a concert pianist, he would have had to pay closer to $5,000 a year for parking. "It was absurd," he says. And while Houston has no Lincoln Center, Mr. Parker says Houston's cultural offerings are impressive. "It has a spectacular symphony orchestra," he says. "As a music professor, that's important to me." The city's opera and ballet are likewise renowned, he says, and tickets cost less than they do in other big cities. Sallie Keller-McNulty, Rice's dean of engineering, tries to drive home Houston's culture to faculty recruits. "It's free to cheap" compared with other cities, says Ms. Keller-McNulty. She says that when comparing offers from multiple institutions, candidates tend to focus on actual dollar figures. That is why it is so important to get professors to come to Houston in person, she says: "They have to come and experience and see." Washington University in St. Louis
José Luis Bermúdez was lured to St. Louis by the opportunity to direct Washington University's philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program. But the philosophy professor was also amazed by the city's real-estate market. Mr. Bermúdez, 39, who came from the University of Stirling, in Scotland, sold a two-bedroom flat in Stirling, while his partner sold her house in Lancaster, England. Together they were able to afford a three-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot house in an affluent neighborhood in St. Louis. Built in the 1920s or 30s, their brick house has gardens out front and in the back. Upon moving stateside, Mr. Bermúdez also picked out a BMW, but prefers to bike the three miles to his campus office. "This is a pretty big recruiting tool for us," says Mr. Bermúdez, of the affordability of St. Louis. When job candidates visit the campus, he says, they get hooked up immediately with a real-estate agent and are often seduced by the varied housing options. Some professors with kids, he says, have moved to St. Louis solely for the good schools and nice residential neighborhoods. Howard Brick, a history professor who has been at Washington for a decade, has worked at colleges in some of the nation's most expensive cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and New York. He says everything in St. Louis is ridiculously cheap by comparison. "Dining is cheaper, entertainment is cheaper, … attending the symphony is cheaper," says Mr. Brick, 52, who lives a mere 15-minute walk from the campus. His wife, an editor, is out of work and looking for a job, he says. Thankfully, he says, in St. Louis, they can afford to live on one salary. Vanderbilt University, Nashville
In Philadelphia, where Edward L. Rubin was a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, his family lived well. He sent his children to private school and bought his daughter horseback-riding lessons. Their suburban Victorian house was larger than the bungalow they had owned in San Francisco in the 1990s, when he was a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But since leaving Philadelphia to become dean of Vanderbilt's law school last summer, Mr. Rubin, 57, has been living an even more luxurious lifestyle. True, the deanship came with a healthy salary increase and a powder-blue Jaguar. But the lower cost of living in Nashville has turbocharged his raise. Private-school tuition for his kids, he estimates, is 20 percent to 30 percent cheaper. His daughter's riding lessons cost half as much. And even though their house in Philadelphia is still on the market, he was able to buy a 9,000-square-foot home in a gated community just 15 minutes from Vanderbilt. It includes a garage apartment with a full kitchen, where his two older sons stay when they visit. While not all professors at Vanderbilt can live like Mr. Rubin on his dean's salary, the cost of real estate in the city is a big draw for faculty recruits, he says. "We make a point of showing them what you can get in Nashville, what a range of options you have here," says Mr. Rubin. Professors can buy houses right in Nashville, a few minutes from the campus, he says, or drive just 25 minutes away to live among horse farms. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Roozbeh Kangari, 54, a professor of architecture and director of the building-construction program at Georgia Tech, has lived in the Atlanta area for 22 years. He and his wife have a four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot house in a suburban subdivision. They have also taken in his father and his mother-in-law. Mr. Kangari, who is of Middle Eastern descent, says Atlanta is a cosmopolitan city with an international restaurant scene. Gas prices are decent, he pays $600 a year for parking, and clothes are not expensive, he says. Maybe that's why the user name for his personal e-mail address is "IloveAtlanta." E. Kent Barefield, a chemistry professor and associate dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech, who has lived in Atlanta for three decades, agrees with Mr. Kangari: "This is an affordable part of the country." When department leaders talk to prospective faculty members, the cost of living usually comes up. "If you compare us to…anywhere in the Northeast or the West Coast," says Mr. Barefield, "you're talking about quality of housing at a much lower price." And while the good school system draws parents with school-age children, he says, full professors tend to be more interested in just finding good neighborhoods. With so many condominiums being built in Atlanta's midtown area, he says, many senior faculty members have been able to snatch up condos in prime locations near the campus. Legend for Chart: A - Institution B - Average full-professor salary C - Local cost-of-living index D - Adjusted salary A: U. of Chicago B: $155,100 C: 126.9 D: $122,194 A: Princeton U. B: $156,800 C: 130.6 D: $120,083 A: Harvard U. B: $168,700 C: 141.5 D: $119,187 A: Massachusetts Institute of Technology B: $140,300 C: 141.5 D: $99,122 A: California Institute of Technology B: $147,800 C: 156.1 D: $94,679 A: Georgetown U. B: $132,500 C: 141.9 D: $93,380 A: Stanford U. B: $156,200 C: 167.8 D: $93,072 A: Boston College B: $127,900 C: 137.6 D: $92,917 A: U. of Southern California B: $129,000 C: 156.1 D: $82,636 A: U. of California at Los Angeles B: $128,400 C: 156.1 D: $82,252 A: New York U. B: $144,000 C: 205.4 D: $70,098 SOURCES: American Association of University Professors; ACCRA PHOTO (COLOR): Jon Kimura Paker with Lucy Chang, a student. PHOTO (COLOR): José Luis Bermúdez PHOTO (COLOR): Edward L. Rubin PHOTO (COLOR): Roozbeh Kangari ~~~~~~~~ By Piper Fogg in the Fair Use guidelines of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act. info [at] singlearticles.com Powered by CommonSense |
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