A significant portion of professor’s pay is prestige, tenure, and the ability to tyrannize your grad students, which the LTFF cannot provide. It’s much more similar to industry in only really being able to pay in actual money.
Separately, I wonder how representative those numbers are for computer science professors, or if it includes only base salary. The very first CS professor at UC Berkeley I looked up on the sacbee database earned over $300,000 , and that excludes any outside income from consulting etc.
Makes sense! I think the seniority levels of most of our grantees are in the grad student/postdoc/early professor range, which means famous professors will be a poor comparison class (but so will e.g. early humanities professors).
A significant portion of professor’s pay is prestige, tenure, and the ability to tyrannize your grad students, which the LTFF cannot provide. It’s much more similar to industry in only really being able to pay in actual money.
Separately, I wonder how representative those numbers are for computer science professors, or if it includes only base salary. The very first CS professor at UC Berkeley I looked up on the sacbee database earned over $300,000 , and that excludes any outside income from consulting etc.
FWIW the first one I looked at (second-year assistant professor I think) was $150k.
I’m guessing you know more professors there than I do so the ones I know are more filtered on seniority.
Makes sense! I think the seniority levels of most of our grantees are in the grad student/postdoc/early professor range, which means famous professors will be a poor comparison class (but so will e.g. early humanities professors).