Universities are breaking the economic bargain that once kept experts in the classroom.
Ask the average person what professors do, and you may hear a familiar story: They work a few hours a week, enjoy lifetime job security and collect bloated paychecks funded by rising tuition.
As a tenured engineering professor with nearly 40 years of service, I can say that this picture is not merely incomplete. It misunderstands how universities have historically recruited and retained faculty, particularly in technical fields.
A faculty career often requires substantial financial sacrifice. In engineering, computer science, medicine and related professions, an experienced practitioner can frequently earn far more in industry than a university is prepared to pay. A senior engineer with decades of experience may command a salary well above $200,000 along with bonuses or equity. After four decades of teaching, advising and research, my salary is barely half of that. Because of salary compression, I earn considerably less than most newly hired assistant professors entering the university today.
Why accept that trade?
For generations, higher education offered an implicit bargain. Faculty members accepted lower lifetime earnings in exchange for forms of compensation that were not entirely financial: intellectual independence, the opportunity to pursue long-term research that might not be considered “sexy” today and, after a rigorous probationary period, tenure.
Tenure was never simply a luxury perk. It was part of the compensation package — a discount universities offered to recruit people they could not afford to match in the private sector. It also served a public purpose by protecting teaching and research from political interference and arbitrary dismissal.
That bargain is now under strain.
Across the country, financially troubled universities are pursuing corporate-style restructurings, eliminating programs and laying off faculty members. At my institution, the Illinois Institute of Technology, administrators recently eliminated roughly a third of the workforce in a single sweep.
In such purges, veteran professors are not necessarily protected by loyalty, decades of service or tenure. Sometimes we survive for a less flattering reason: We are cheap.
My salary has been compressed by decades of raises well below inflation and stagnant institutional pay scales. I carry a substantial teaching and advising load for far less than the cost of replacing me. The result is an uncomfortable inversion: A university may eliminate a more highly paid professor while retaining a veteran whose compensation is far under the market value of the work.
That is not a defense of inefficiency. It is evidence of a broken compensation system.
To the public, faculty reductions can look like overdue administrative discipline. Universities do need to examine their budgets, and professors should not be exempt from scrutiny. But the public should also understand what happens when institutions reduce job security while continuing to pay way less than competing employers.
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The academic talent pipeline begins to weaken.
Why would a promising young researcher accept a faculty offer of $120,000 with uncertain employment prospects when a technology company or defense contractor offers $180,000 on the first day? Some will still choose academia, motivated by teaching, research or public service. But fewer will be able to afford the choice, especially when housing, family obligations and student debt are part of the calculation. They have years before they catch up to their classmates because they needed a Ph.D.
The consequences will not be confined to faculty lounges. Students will encounter larger classes, fewer course offerings and a more transient instructional workforce. Universities may discover that it is possible to reduce payroll without immediately reducing enrollment, but impossible to preserve educational quality indefinitely while making academic careers less competitive.
Tenure is often caricatured as a shield for lazy professors. In reality, it is one component of a larger bargain that has helped universities attract experts away from more lucrative careers. If institutions want the flexibility of corporations, they may eventually have to offer corporate compensation, with the inescapable effect on tuition.
Otherwise, the most marketable scientists, engineers and scholars will do what rational workers do: They will go where their expertise is valued — and paid for.
Francisco Ruiz has been a faculty member at the Illinois Institute of Technology for nearly four decades. He is a two-time winner of the university’s top teaching award. The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s alone and do not represent his employer’s.
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