Today the Chronicle of Higher Education published a table of data on the “Average Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty at 4-Year Colleges, 2013–14,” with an accompanying article. Except for one chart in the article about pay increases, the Chronicle did not present the data in visual form. So I offer you two charts that you can send to your loved ones to justify your life choices. You’ll probably want to click through to the SVG or PDF versions of these charts so that you can scroll and zoom.
The first chart (SVG, PDF) shows salaries grouped by institution type:
The second chart (SVG, PDF) shows salaries grouped by discipline:*Note:* The labels on the bars are average salaries for assistant, associate, and full professors; I've left out new assistant professors. The vertical lines in the first chart are the average salaries by rank for all disciplines. You'll notice that in a number of disciplines, new assistant professors make more on average than assistant professors. I assume this is because there are fewer new assistant professors and so the average is more likely to be skewed, because wealthier institutions are the ones that are hiring new assistant professors, because raises have stagnated during the economic downturn, and because of a thing they call "[salary compression](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/11/university-tries-deal-salary-compression-among-faculty-members)."
