People outside of academia may notice that professors move from one school to another from time to time, but what they probably don't realize is how competitive (and organized) the academic job market is. This article does a pretty good job of shining some light on how schools compete with each other for both new and established professors in the economics world. The best part of the article is probably the last paragraph:
"I tell our PhD students, you're fortunate to have chosen economics instead of philosophy or English," says John Cawley, professor of economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "Because the reality is, everyone gets a job."
I think that is the first time I've heard someone say that it's good to be an economist, but the numbers do in fact back up Professor Cawley's statement. This article (if you scroll to the bottom) shows professor salaries in different fields as compared to the salary of an English professor. Economics professors do pretty well on this scale, not only beating the benchmark salary consistently but also increasing their lead over time, resulting in a 41.2% pay premium for the 2009-2010 academic year. Only business and law professors do better, which is particularly interesting since a pretty significant number of those are technically economists as well.
Comments