Also. Middle class isn’t poor. It’s literally not that.
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In the US Pew defines it as household income between $43,350 and $130,000.
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https://x.com/mattmfm/status/1825496334754845166
It’s really going to come down to Pennsylvania won’t it?
I would be a bit surprised to find that tenured and tenure-track salaries have meaningfully outpaced inflation in that time frame. If you include the heavier reliance on non-tenured teaching and research positions, salaries almost certainly have gone down.
Where the fuck in America is $43500 middle class? That seems unlivable.
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If WI, MI, and NV are actually all solid (I like her chances in each, but they’re all open questions IMO), any of PA/NC/GA would work. And AZ would be irrelevant.
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Again I haven’t looked at the data, but I think salaries for certain areas (like certain b-school departments) have grown a lot. That shouldn’t be confused with salary changes over the career of an individual academic, though. Those are typically very modest unless you switch institutions.
@spidercrab could give us some inside baseball
What is the overlap between PEWs definition and people’s self describing their class?
McGill is in my opinion the top Canadian school academics wise and comparable with any Ivy League school, but U of T usually wins the rankings.
That being said, at my university non-tenured profs were called instructors and I assume depending on the department they weren’t paid all that well.
Went to Western which is a top 5 Canadian university and had an older instructor hit me with his car while backing out of his driveway as I was walking to school once. The car was an old Corolla and the house was a standard 2 storey, 2000-2300 sq ft home in a neighbourhood where many students rented.
If as a prof you can get your name on a mandatory textbook, that is where the money is.
My 1st year econ prof Parkin wrote the econ textbook that was used by our school and (as per the online registration) hundreds of schools in the US and Canada. Having 50k-250k students buying your book each year at $150-200 a pop (2005 $) means you live very well. He would peace out for a few weeks to a month each year and his wife who was also a tenured Econ prof would fill in while he spoke in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum.
2nd edit: totally forgot that university teachers are considered public employees and all public employees in Ontario making >100k have their salaries (inclusive of bonus)published as part of the Sunshine list. I assume wages have gone up a lot, but here’s an article on it recently Ontario Sunshine List includes 5,246 U of T employees making over $100,000 per year – The Varsity.
U of T probably commands a higher wage than other universities because of the high cost of living.
Yea NC generally was more blue than Ga up until last few years so it’s not crazy
I remember when Missouri was considered the bellwether for the country, which seems laughable now.
There’s even a Wikipedia page about it.
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biden was riding warnock’s tailcoat
A dead Democrat won a senate seat in 2000 against an incumbent John Ashcroft.
Nevada is the biggest Trump margin of the battlegrounds on RCP at the moment, so give him that. Then the 3 Great Lakes all fall for Kamala.
It’s all coming down to my hometown of Omaha baby. What a great system we have.
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I can’t take any talk of razor-thin margins and the election coming down to one state or one stupid NE district, or one GOP-led state refusing to certify or any of this shit.
I want all vibes all the time, I want an extra percentage point per week in every single swing state poll between now and November, and I want 350+ EVs.
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Gotta reserve judgement until the poll unskewers get a look at the crosstabs imo.
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That would be ideal. It would be nice if the polls were wrong in our favor for once, rather than having 4% polling leads and still sweating out some of these states.
Wisconsin in 2020 was a 6 point swing for chrissakes, others were more on point (PA closed at Biden +1.2 and final results were exactly that).
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Sure, I can give a little bit of relevant info. Necessary background knowledge: I’m talking about tenure-track positions only, which are a smaller and smaller percentage of total jobs. The progression here is Assistant → Associate → Full Professor, where Associate and Full are generally tenured (although some schools do have untenured Associates).
- Public schools usually have searchable databases open to the public, so if you’re curious about what faculty make in different disciplies, you can just look them up.
- B-school professors do earn more than other disciplines. Within B-schools, finance and accounting (in that order) tend to make more than other disciplines.
- My own experience is that my current salary for the 2024-2025 academic year is almost exactly double my starting salary in 2004 as a new assistant professor. That outpaces inflation by a decent amount. Inflation was 66% over that time period. However, that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, as I’ve also experienced a couple of promotions along the way. I think starting salaries for new assistant professors have probably just about matched inflation for that period.
- At some point between 1980-2000, I think there was a real (adjusted for inflation) increase in starting salaries, I just don’t know how big that was. I remember one of the senior faculty at my first institution talking about how little he was paid in like 1977 but I don’t remember what the numbers were.
- Outside of promotions, where some schools have automatic and explicitly-stated increases, and counters to outside job offers, salary increases are not high in academia. Salary compression is common, where the starting salaries for new assistant professors grows faster than the salaries of experienced professors. It’s not even uncommon to see salary inversion, where new assistant salaries are higher than associate and even full professors in the same department. When that salary information is public, it can lead to resentment.
- No one should feel sorry for the financial well-being of tenured professors in b-schools (or law schools or medical schools or computer science). It’s not even that the salaries are so high (because they sometimes aren’t), but rather that there’s a guaranteed job doing extremely non-demanding work, so the idea of early retirement isn’t even all that appealing.
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Focaldata?