how to reach my goal

[tbroker]

is it weird that my goal is to be a great teacher. I do not care to win a medal or ever be highly mentioned by other economists. I however want to be regarded in my department and by my students. I would love to teach at a top lac school. how would I reach this goal and do I have to go top 10? what is the competition for this sort of job? and a guess on its pay.

[mosfro]

at my undergrad, there was someone who consistently won best professor, professor of the year, "students' award for excellence in teaching", etc, and he is a visiting factuly/lecturer with a contract that renews every 2 years.

No tenure, and because he is a visiting lecturer, he gets paid little

50-60k at max?

 

LACs pay around 60-70k from what i understand, more to the 60 side

many of these positions do not require to have a phd, a masters would suffice,

[Dannyb19]

I think at most highly regarded LAC's they require professors to have PhD's or be in the last stages of their dissertation. I think the salarly estimates are pretty close, but tenured (econ) faculty even at LAC's can get close to or into six figures.

[tbroker]

really at my LAC every professor must have a terminal degree in their respective field. is it hard to get these jobs. i think i would love research but after talking with a professor at columbia he basically told me that how it works is he teaches 2 classes, does NO correcting or other admin work and does research. he broke it down at 20/80 teaching/research. i am looking for a 50/50 or better in terms of teaching. but to leave ibanking i would need at least a thought of around 70-80K with more than a 2 year K hopefully a contract of at least 3-5

[kartelite]

I believe median starting salaries for new assistant professors at non-PhD (maybe non-masters) granting institutions were around $65,000. At the current rate of increase, I'd expect that to be close to $75,000 by the time we're on the job market. Most top LAC's would probably pay a bit more, and this is just base, 9 month starting salary.

[tbroker]

Thanks! Now to help me on my other questions. To teach at a Williams, Davidson, Holy Cross, Providence College, Amherst, etc. Where do I have to go to graduate school? And what is the competition for these types of schools?

[apropos]

I think, once you have a PhD, spending so much time on teaching undergraduate economics will be kind of boring. The reason is that the undergraduate courses are typically very elementary and distant from what actually going in the field. It's almost like becoming some sort of rocket scientist and then going to LAC to teach arithmetic.

[FightingIrish1]

Everyone has to put in that time with intro, so quit *****ing and do it. Anyway how many "cool" classes does a professor at a top U teach anyway. They all put in their time, move up to Grad courses and sit in their offices faking to do research after they have been there long enough.

[EconCandidate]

Remember, the "top" liberal arts college still expect their faculty to be producing research output.

[kartelite]

Thanks! Now to help me on my other questions. To teach at a Williams, Davidson, Holy Cross, Providence College, Amherst, etc. Where do I have to go to graduate school? And what is the competition for these types of schools?

 

No I definitely understand what you are saying. It can be a really good experience to teach undergrads at these types of schools, and it is something I think I would enjoy. You can inject your own spin on the classes, even the intro ones, and you can have a lot of flexibility in introducing your own upper level courses and seminars. When you've got between 5 and 15 students, you can really interact with them and it is not just a matter of regurgitating the same material every semester. At a liberal arts school, you also feel a lot more like part of the community.

 

I think the people who don't see the appeal are those who probably attended large undergraduate schools where most classes were large lectures.

 

I think the best way to see "where to go" to get your PhD is to simply look at where the people who are teaching there went. I think you'd expect a lot of top 10 schools, but some lower ones as well to be represented. They are also more concerned with your teaching evals than your job market paper, relative to other employers.

 

Here's the list of professors from my LAC:

 

University of Wisconsin

The George Washington University

North Carolina State University

Oklahoma State University

University of North Carolina

University of Illinois at Urbana

Princeton University

University of Wisconsin

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

University of California at Los Angeles

University of Maryland

Washington University

Vanderbilt University

Harvard University

Columbia University

Yale University

Yale University

North Carolina State University

[tbroker]

Yea Karl you get my point. I go to Holy Cross, I really like the community. All the prof live nearby and I have played golf with a few of my econ profs multiples times. There is a feel of a very intellectual High School. It is not like my good friend who goes to U Tennessee. I have sat in on a econometrics course with 350 people, that is insane. It is not fun and you cannot be orginal. Because you need to just get the point across and there is NO interaction. being from the NE I want to stay in the NE at a LAC. I know going to MIT and Harvard will get you into most LAC but I bet most of those grads do not even want to go to a LAC. We just interviewed an MIT grad who turned down the offer to go to U Oklahoma. Therefore, where is a great school to go to, is it to 5-10, 20, 30, 40, etc?

[Tex Jansen]

The absolute best LACs (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore) consider their jobs to be research positions. They also want their faculty to have sexy degrees and therefore tend to hire from the very best Ph.D. programs. I know at one of these schools, the search committee themselves goes through the applicants from a list of about 20 select schools. Other faculty quickly scan the remainder to see if there are any diamonds in the rough.

 

Things really change once you get to many of the second tier LACs (e.g. Colby, Bates, Hamilton) A lot of these places are more interested in good teaching and there is less of an emphasis on reserach. At some of these places, going to Harvard may actually hurt your chances because you are unlikely to have teaching experience. These schools are reluctant to interview anyone who hasn't taught a few courses (TAing does not count). By the way, places like this were typically paying between 70 and 80 this year.

[tbroker]

I would be perfectly happy with making between 60-80K for several years and then tenuring for low 6 figures. To me it is about teaching and the love of people and education, not finding the next Black-Scholes Model. Therefore, what LAC would fit that goal?

[Tex Jansen]

Keep in mind that research universities are pretty uncommon. The vast majority of econ departments exist primarily to teach, not publish. If ending up at such a place is your goal, I would actually recommend that you not aim too high in picking your grad program. Instead, I would think about a mid ranked program, with a very low student to faculty ratio where grad students are expected to teach several independent courses for funding.

I went to such a program and probably between 80 and 90% of grads ended up with a tenure track job. The downside is that it is harder to get a research job at that type of place, but it sounds as if you don't care about that.

 

I think you are being overly optimistic about tenure and the associated salary bump. The average starting salary for a new, full professor at non research places was only about $100K this year

[Tex Jansen]

double post

[tunedradio]

Here's the faculty website from Williams: http://www.williams.edu/Economics/faculty.shtml

 

I know their offers in the past couple of years have gone entirely to graduates from top 10 schools, with only one or two exceptions.

[tbroker]

 

I think you are being overly optimistic about tenure and the associated salary bump. The average starting salary for a new, full professor at non research places was only about $100K this year

 

I dont get how I am optimistic if we both said tenure jobs would be in 6 figure. I was saying after 4-5 years if I could get a tenure position paying low 100K I would be very very content.

[Tex Jansen]

The number I was citing is for a full professor who is being lured to a new place by a good offer.

 

It seems likely that a newly tenured associate professor who is not threatening to leave would get much less.

[tbroker]

how much would guess an adjunct and a newly tenured prof make at a mid lac such as holy cross...and how about no name state schools like umass boston(not being the main campus)

[tbroker]

bump please

[Tex Jansen]

I have seen recent starting salaries for new assistants at CSUs and SUNY (excluding the 4 research schools) between 65K and 80K over the last two or three years. I imagine that U-Mass (Not Amherst) would be similar. A salary bump of 10K would seem reasonable at tenure, but that is just a guess.

 

The starting salaries at the Mass State Colleges (e.g. Salem, Fitritch) are notoriously awful, I have heard the lower 40s.

 

Adjuncts make less than assistants but I am not sure by how much. I would guess that they tend to be near 40K or 50K. If you have teaching experience coming out of grad school, it is hard to end up adjuncting.

[Tex Jansen]

I have seen recent starting salaries for new assistants at CSUs and SUNY (excluding the 4 research schools) between 65K and 80K over the last two or three years. I imagine that U-Mass (Not Amherst) would be similar. A salary bump of 10K would seem reasonable at tenure, but that is just a guess.

 

The starting salaries at the Mass State Colleges (e.g. Salem, Fitritch) are notoriously awful, I have heard the lower 40s.

 

Adjuncts make less than assistants but I am not sure by how much. I would guess that they tend to be near 40K or 50K. If you have teaching experience coming out of grad school, it is hard to end up adjuncting.

[jcn]

"I know going to MIT and Harvard will get you into most LAC but I bet most of those grads do not even want to go to a LAC."

 

According to David Colander, nearly 20% of MIT PhD students want to teach at a LAC. I think that at a "good" LAC, the departments can afford to be selective in their hires. At my small, relatively unknown LAC, all the econ profs got their degrees from top 30 programs. However, at most liberal arts colleges, prestigious or not, you will have freedom to teach interesting classes and good interaction with intelligent students.

[kartelite]

A typical full professor at a PhD-granting school makes over twice what new assistant hires make. I would assume the same holds for LAC's. In fact I believe full professors made $184k at non-PhD granting schools.

[ekonomiks]

Professors at my LAC got their PhD's from the following places:

 

Harvard

MIT

Northwestern (didn't get tenure, leaving)

Minnesota

Minnesota (post-doc, getting tenure, huge star)

Columbia (didn't get tenure, left)

Oregon (didn't tenure, leaving)

West Virginia (visiting)

 

Most of the candidates they interviewed last year came from top-10 schools; none of them got an offer (there's still a vacancy). The ratio is something like 90% teaching to 10% research, but they all do decent research. Some of them have published in top journals (American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and others). So the competition is indeed fierce. All of them chose to come here because they love teaching and hate overspecialization. A couple of them are alumni, so that might be another reason. However another alumnus just interviewed a while ago and didn't get the job. Oh, and as far as I know, they get decent paychecks.