The topic du jour around here is the pay scale for cops in Rockland County. The Clarkstown police chief makes over $300,000 per year.
According to one national ranking, Clarkstown, in Rockland County, is
consistently among the safest towns in America with at least 75,000
people, based on its crime statistics. In 2007, it was the second
safest, and in 2008, it was the sixth.But Clarkstown is also at
the top of another category that Chief Peter T. Noonan is less thrilled
to discuss: police pay.
consistently among the safest towns in America with at least 75,000
people, based on its crime statistics. In 2007, it was the second
safest, and in 2008, it was the sixth.But Clarkstown is also at
the top of another category that Chief Peter T. Noonan is less thrilled
to discuss: police pay.
In 2008, Chief Noonan, 56, made $332,529.88. He
was not even the highest paid: One of his two captains earned $335,676,
while working two days a week because of a disability and spending
three days a week undergoing physical therapy. The other captain earned
$311,369.
School teachers do really well there, too. Second grade teachers make more than college professors.
I'm in the wrong line of work.
This then led to griping about the pay of the local superintendent. He is in charge of two elementary schools and one middle school. He makes $200,000 per year.
Apt. 11d 
Don’t remind me of this stuff. I’m working at midnight to finish something on deadline and it was announced months ago that Pitt won’t be doing raises this year. The schools on the other hand get to look at the bright side: Two-thirds of students graduate, enrollment is only down by 25%, etc.
LikeLike
Vallejo went bankrupt that way. It’s always easy on the pols to agree to pay packages which will be costly in the out years, and solve a current problem.
LikeLike
My BIL teaches at Clarkstown. Now I wonder how much he makes and if it’s more than I do. 🙂
Our superintendent makes about $120K, which is about $119K more than he deserves. Hate. Him. He’s retiring, though, and his replacement has already been hired.
LikeLike
Second grade teachers make more than college professors.
Shouldn’t they? In my experience they have longer hours, a lot more responsibility, and a lot less freedom.
LikeLike
In my experience they have longer hours, a lot more responsibility, and a lot less freedom.
College professor that I am, I have to agree with this. I suppose I could go on about the peculiar stresses and difficulties inherent in committee work, research expectations, and all the rest, and much of it is true, but still, no: we just got back from a kindergarten orientation for our third daughter, and once again I was struck by how much more work, and how many more regulations, those good elementary school teachers have on their plates. My hat goes off to them–and my taxes.
LikeLike
Shouldn’t they? In my experience they have longer hours, a lot more responsibility, and a lot less freedom.
I don’t object out-of-hand to the idea of primary school teachers making more than I do, but I think this would be incorrect justification. It is not really logistically possible that a second grade teacher works longer hours than I do – maybe an AP English teacher or others with large piles of grading and not enough free periods during the day, but not elementary school. And as far as responsibility, I’m almost single-handedly responsible for the livelihoods of two graduate students and two researchers (with six children among them!). At the very least, you could argue that I have a different type of responsibility – I don’t have to worry about someone choking on a bead during a lab meeting 😉 – but not really less responsibility. The freedom thing I’ll totally grant.
LikeLike
“I don’t have to worry about someone choking on a bead during a lab meeting ;)”
*insert comment about typical academic here*
LikeLike
I very much doubt those higher levels of public sector pay are sustainable in most parts of the country. The pensions alone are going to cause a crisis in Pittsburgh. In 2001 the PA legislature increased teacher retirement benefits by 25% without increasing what the teachers or the district were required to pay in. They did this so they’d look less like shits when they increased their own pension by 50%. Basically, they assumed continual 8 to 10% returns on the pension fund and, according to the PA Supreme Court, taxpayers are just stuck.
The PA Supreme Court also ordered a county-wide property assessment re-evaluation. This later decision is almost certainly correct as the valuations are clearly not fair. The bottom dropped out of the market in several down-market neighborhoods and rose rather quickly in the nicer areas. The county kept the old valuations because they didn’t want to lose the election, but it looks like they will finally have to re-assess.
The city of Pittsburgh’s pensions are in even worse shape than the school’s pension and have to be fixed soon. For the city, over-optimistic assumptions about market returns are exacerbated by a dropping population.
So, basically in the next couple of years they are going to dump a big load of new taxes on a shrinking population whose retirement assets have dropped, whose wages are stagnant, and who are receiving poorer public services all the time.
I have no idea how this will end, but my guess is very poorly for everyone except the baby boomers. The city and county can’t cut their pension obligations and cannot actually increases taxes by that much as those with the most ability to pay are also the most able to move out of the county or across the country. In the end, I’m guessing that the public sector unions will sell-out their working members (and future members) to protect the benefits of their retired members and that public sector compensation will take a dive locally.
LikeLike
The city and county can’t cut their pension obligations and cannot actually increases taxes by that much as those with the most ability to pay are also the most able to move out of the county or across the country.
Yeah, it was after Ravenstahl’s January press conference during which he announced the municipal pension fund was only 35% funded that we started having serious conversations about leaving the region. It’s a hard position to be in — we love the region and our life in it right now, but it’s so clear that the financial shit is going to hit the fan in the next decade, and we’re not inclined to cheat our children’s college fund to pay 3x the taxes to make up for past residents’ financial mismanagement. It’s a great area, but so is Columbus, OH and Raleigh, NC and…
A neighbor who is a life-long resident of Pgh had a great line the other day: “When the steel mills closed, they gave everyone a job in Public Works.” It explains so, so much about Pgh.
LikeLike
Have you been following me around? I went from Columbus to Durham to Pittsburgh.
We’re not thinking of leaving the region, just the city.
LikeLike
It is not really logistically possible that a second grade teacher works longer hours than I do – maybe an AP English teacher or others with large piles of grading and not enough free periods during the day, but not elementary school. And as far as responsibility, I’m almost single-handedly responsible for the livelihoods of two graduate students and two researchers (with six children among them!).
I’ll grant that those academics among us with large research agendas which involve grad students and lab workers and such have responsibilities far beyond those of second grade teachers. But if you’re just talking about the hours involved in writing lectures and grading papers and exams? From what I’ve been able to tell from the four elementary schools in different states that we’ve taken our kids to thusfar, the work they put into pulling together lessons and activities day after day generally exceeds, sometimes greatly exceeds, what is expected of me (and I teach at a 4-4 school).
LikeLike
Actually, I’m pretty confident that I work harder than a second grade teacher and that my training in grad school was more intensive, more time consuming and more expensive. That may be totally politically incorrect to make that statement, but it’s true. My professional development is unpaid. I’m routinely up until wee hours of the night doing work. My biggest problem isn’t that 2nd grade teachers are paid too much, but that college professors are paid so poorly. The young professors at my school have a very difficult time affording homes within an hour of the campus.
LikeLike
But if you’re just talking about the hours involved in writing lectures and grading papers and exams?
But why would you talk about just that, even absent research and funding obligations? I guess I don’t understand the cavalier dismissal of administrative work in your previous comment. What about advising undergrads? Supervising honors theses? Writing grad school and scholarship recommendations? Curriculum committees? Committees to figure out how to cover parental leaves in the department? Committees to hire a new network administrator? Putting together a tenure file? Sabbatical proposals? I’d think all of this would be necessary even at SLACs? I don’t necessarily think hard= most hours, but if we’re trying to account for pure hours worked I can’t imagine leaving off admin duties.
MH, that’s hilarious: I was just throwing out other cities where I originally had offers.
LikeLike
“My biggest problem isn’t that 2nd grade teachers are paid too much, but that college professors are paid so poorly. The young professors at my school have a very difficult time affording homes within an hour of the campus. ”
College professors are paid what’s required in order to get them to do the job. They take the pay because the rewards, of independence, of intellectual stimulation, of freedom, of tenure are all pretty significant.
You may work harder than a 2nd grade teacher, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t trade the job, even if the pay was equalized. Presumably, this is because one offers non-pay benefits that the other doesn’t. And, let’s face it, one of the reasons academics work so hard is that a fair amount of their labor is not required, but for love.
I don’t know about the training — I know that I have very esoteric knowledge that took significant time to acquire (that is, I have knowledge that only a small group of people in the world have). That does make my expertise special, compared to a 2nd grade teacher. But, it’s certainly a lot less generalizable, too, and a lot less required. I’ve never seen a good reason why the teaching component of a K-12 degree shouldn’t be paid the same amount as the teaching component of a 13-16 degree.
(the research component is separate, and my suspicion is that its monetary value depends a lot on the field)
LikeLike
Oh, and I was shocked at the level of pay here. It’s clearly an unsustainable model, and suggests the same kind of back-dealing (and hiding of compensation) that we’ve seen in corporate boards. How the contracts will be renegotiated is a good question (as Dave points out, Valejo required bankruptcy — at some point, I think it’s a root that a bunch of cities that made unwise future promises are going to have to take). Bankruptcy is not fun.
LikeLike
Laura, I don’t think it’s politically incorrect at all to acknowledge that earning a Ph.D. is almost certainly going to be more intense, more expensive, and take longer than anything which a second-grade teacher will have to do to be able to find a job. And you make a good point about “professional development” being something that, at best, academics like us may be able to find some reimbursements for (depending on how we define “profesional”!), but we certainly aren’t paid to keep up on. I hadn’t thought about that. I still suspect that, when you put together the hours in the classroom and the office hours and designing courses, we still may not be putting in the same day to day workload that elementary and secondary school teachers are. Or, I guess I should say, I strongly suspect that I’m not, though perhaps that says more about me than anything else.
You’ll get no disagreement from me about the lousy pay for college professors. After six years of teaching, we only finally cracked the 50K ceiling last year.
LikeLike
Oh, I forgot to be snotty about this earlier:
Don’t remind me of this stuff. I’m working at midnight to finish something on deadline and it was announced months ago that Pitt won’t be doing raises this year.
Yeah, I’m bringing in 2.5 times the money I did last year — I’m hitting a million for the first time ever, if I can brag a bit — but am not allowed to give my staff raises, even though they put in more hours than I did on those proposals. I wouldn’t blame them a bit if they left for industry.
LikeLike
I guess I don’t understand the cavalier dismissal of administrative work in your previous comment. What about advising undergrads? Supervising honors theses? Writing grad school and scholarship recommendations? Curriculum committees? Committees to figure out how to cover parental leaves in the department? Committees to hire a new network administrator? Putting together a tenure file? Sabbatical proposals?
I guess I can’t disagree with anything you list here, Siobhan, except that every university culture (and how every faculty member interacts with that culture) is different, and in my experience, I simply don’t see all the committee work I’m on–general education revision committee, library dean hiring committee–and all the advising and recommendation-writing I do as somehow needing to be counted in the way my own actual work does. Maybe it should be. Then again, maybe this goes to bj’s point about college professors being paid what’s required to get us not to leave and to something else. It isn’t entirely that simple, of course (you’ve got some little issues like heavy debt loads and narrowed ranges of job opportunities driving you down the same path, even if they pay is crap, because you’re desperate to find anything that’ll keep you moving forward), but there’s surely a fair amount of truth as well to the idea that a lot of the work us academics do is assumed/expected to be “free” (uncompensated) work because, well, we love doing what we do, and what we do just happens to include all this other stuff.
I do wish I was paid for having been volunteered to be the secretary at college meetings; that’s a pain. But most of the other committee stuff? Give me a free lunch once in a while, and basically, I’m good.
LikeLike
“(the research component is separate, and my suspicion is that its monetary value depends a lot on the field)”
PS: Since the advent of the “percent effort” on research grants model in the sciences, in medical schools, it’s a fair bet to say that the teaching and research components of a job are actually paid off of different sources of funding. Universities do invest (i.e. startup packages, etc.), but the do so largely on the income generated by other members of their faculty. Then, the new faculty are expected to generate funding for their own research (including their salaries).
And a bunch of Sibohan’s list (i.e. sitting on various committees related to administering the institution, including curriculum development, hiring committees, determining web access) is also done by K-12 teachers. Some, supervising theses (i.e. non-classroom instruction), for example, is also done by 6-12 (though, I’ll admit, mostly unlikely for K-5).
I think the key point that determines the difference in pay for the two groups is the replacibility of the individuals (i.e. can we find a person with similar skills to take over?). With the over-abundance of humanities Ph.D’s willing to do the job, there’s no logical reason to pay college professors more. I’m really wary of discussions that involve getting higher pay because we *deserve* it — there are a lot of very deserving and underpaid individuals out there.
(now unions play a role in setting the cost of elementary school teachers, and I think perhaps they could also play a role in setting the price of college professors, but that’s a choice only some faculty have been willing to make).
LikeLike
According the my favorite local blog that doesn’t run parody news items, Pittsburgh is much broker than Valejo. See http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-vallejo-matters-part-ii.html
To quote from that article (which pre-dates the biggest stock crash) “When you add it all up I would bet the debt per household in the city of Pittsburgh is well over $10K before you begin to include school district debt, the unfunded health liability, or anything else.” (He’s referring to local government debt per household, not household debt.)
So far, the state won’t let Pittsburgh go bankrupt. If the state did let us go under, I would be very hopeful for the future of the city.
LikeLike
“Yeah, I’m bringing in 2.5 times the money I did last year — I’m hitting a million for the first time ever, if I can brag a bit — but am not allowed to give my staff raises, even though they put in more hours than I did on those proposals. I wouldn’t blame them a bit if they left for industry.”
This is the reason some universities can’t even consider “across the board cuts” in order to reduce layoffs, right? Much of the money that funds the people we think work for a major research university really get paid by a funding agency. Of course, this co-mingling of public/private funds is what coaches use to justify their salaries, too. I guess I think the solution to this problem is that the institute should really become private (i.e. football or a research institute that thinks they’d do better without having the university attached, including its propensity for across the board wage freezes).
LikeLike
Good question, bj. My institution technically did an “across the board” freeze, but they’re pretty tight-lipped about the details and most of us suspect that there are several private exemptions, either due to grant requirements, as you pointed out, or just to placate the rainmakers ($1mil makes me pretty small potatoes, even within my own department). I’m hardly one of the anti-administration conspiracy theorists, but quite a few of us are fuming about the secrecy and the attempts to tie our hands in how we spend grant money in the name of “fairness”.
I know we’re supposed to pretend that institution-wide freezes are always preferable to layoffs, but goodness knows we have some pockets of utter incompetence here (I’m looking at you, Tech Transfer Office) and it’s pretty frustrating to tell staff they can’t have a modest 3% raise out of money they earned, of which the institution took 40% right off the top, so that the lady who spends all day updating her cat pictures online can keep her job.
LikeLike
(By the way, that wasn’t a general slam at cat ladies: that’s a specific, documented example.)
LikeLike
So I should get back to work.
LikeLike
Yes, luckily for faculty, venting about the administration counts as “professional development”.
LikeLike
bj – Truthfully, there are many days when I wish I had gone the easy route and became a 2nd grade teacher. I wouldn’t have a mountain of grad school loans. I wouldn’t be writing conference papers all summer and funding the travel expenses myself. I would have made more than $30,000 per year. Hell, I would probably have a job next fall. The reason that academia pays their faculty so poorly has nothing to do with the fantastic life-style. It ain’t all that. It’s because, as Russell says, we haven’t been trained to do anything else. We’re stuck. And there is also an over supply of PhDs and mediocre unions.
LikeLike
I guess I think the solution to this problem is that the institute should really become private (i.e. football or a research institute that thinks they’d do better without having the university attached, including its propensity for across the board wage freezes).
This conversation has really helped me to understand and articulate some of my frustrations with my institution. Thinking more about this comment, I want to clarify that I don’t really mind if our funding subsidizes the arts departments or the office of international education or what have you. I really don’t want philosophy and history being written only by the independently wealthy and/or celibate.*
I’m starting to understand that what really upsets me is inertia, the idea that we’re an academic institution and therefore shouldn’t care about performance or efficiency or usefulness (except in our young faculty, of course). I’m not talking about utterly ruthless, cost-based analysis — of course most, if not all, academic and administrative units won’t turn a profit, whatever that means. I’m fine with that. But I wish I had a stronger sense that someone was actually watching over these units, that someone was actually asking “Do we really need three full-time staffers to plan this one relatively minor campus event?”
(* Actually, as a devoted reader of Dean Dad, I’m not sure that we actually do subsidize the “evergreen departments”, which, at his school at least, turn a “profit” and subsidize other disciplines like nursing. I suspect our overhead mostly goes toward paying for glossy admissions marketing and orientation week and facilities management and paying for the nth resodding of the patch of grass that they kill every single commencement and the president’s salary.)
LikeLike
laura, is it too nosy to ask how you ended up with grad school loans?
LikeLike
The median salary for an elementary school teacher (with 1-4 years experience) in the US is a little over $35,000 a year; the median salary for a college professor with the same number of years of experience is just over $50,000. Rockland county’s payscale is not representative of teachers’ (nor cops’) salaries.
I don’t doubt that the preparation for college professor is more academically rigorous and takes longer, but I don’t believe that the job requires more day to day preparation than the job of a K-12 teacher. The payoff for college professors is supposed to be flexibility, interesting and intellectually challenging work, prestige, and yes, salary, when compared with a K-12 teacher’s. That’s part of the reason there’s an oversupply of college teachers. I suspect the amount of time and energy required for college teacher and K-12 teacher is roughly equal, supposing that both are dedicated educators who want the best for their students, though the types of tasks will be different for every age group.
LikeLike
The school teachers who have connections and have noe experience do well in Clarkstown…God help you if you are experienced and of middle age…discrimination is rampant up here!
LikeLike
Hmm. This may be snarky, but I’ve never heard that K-12 folks must publish original research as a significant component of their job. I must do that to keep mine. (Poli. Sci, not R1).
I’d write more, but I must finish grading these d%^$ed papers.
LikeLike
In this area, the median salary of teachers is in the $80,000 range.
The median teacher’s salary in Westchester and Putnam was $87,196 compared with Rockland’s median teacher’s salary of $83,229 in 2006-07. While Scarsdale’s teachers ranked first with an average salary of $95,848, Nanuet’s teachers earned the lowest at $40,329.
The college professors at my school will never make what the average eighth grade English teacher makes.
But this isn’t a big issue for me, so I’m not comment further.
I have a lot of student loan debt, because my school did not fund its students at all. They paid my tuition, but that was peanuts compared to the huge expenses of living in Manhattan. I worked at least 20 hours a week throughout grad school, so my loans weren’t horrible. But my husband also had his own debt, which was sizable. Less work for historians in grad school. Some of my friends left grad school $100,000 in debt.
LikeLike
“I have a lot of student loan debt, because my school did not fund its students at all. They paid my tuition, but that was peanuts compared to the huge expenses of living in Manhattan. I worked at least 20 hours a week throughout grad school, so my loans weren’t horrible. But my husband also had his own debt, which was sizable. Less work for historians in grad school. Some of my friends left grad school $100,000 in debt.”
Yuck. I have to question the judgment and/or the ethics of anybody who would run a graduate program on those terms. It’s somewhere in the same category as sticking you with thousands of dollars of inventory for a multi-level marketing venture–except worse since the numbers are so much bigger and you wouldn’t invest most of a decade in MLM unless you were actually making money.
LikeLike
And the faculty pay at Princeton is $180,000, at NYU it’s $170,000 (http://abovethelaw.com/2009/04/how_much_do_your_professors_ma.php). No teacher in my system will ever make anywhere near that. All this shows is that teachers at all levels in wealthier areas/more elite schools make more money. The median is still the median, and on average, college professors make more than elementary school teachers.
K-12 teachers have no requirement to publish, but college professors aren’t evaluated by what their students are able to score on standardized tests. At least publishing is more within the individual’s power to control.
LikeLike
“… but college professors aren’t evaluated by what their students are able to score on standardized tests.”
And public school K-12 teachers are? Where? I’ve heard of some places where a teacher can get a bonus for good test performance, but those are very rare and heavily resisted. I haven’t heard of any district where a teacher could lose a job for his/her students doing poorly on a test.
LikeLike
I’ve been following the Zinkhan case at UGA (marketing prof killed his wife and 2 other people and has now disappeared), and I read in one article that he was making $187K. !!!! Full prof, former dept. head, big in the field.
I don’t make $187K. Not nearly. I think it’s faculty in the business fields and the superstars who make that much.
Ah, I see. That site gave info on salaries for LAW faculty, not the average for regular profs.
LikeLike
That guy used to be at CMU I think.
LikeLike
The median is still the median, and on average, college professors make more than elementary school teachers.
I can’t speak to SLACs, but every professor I know personally works twelve months a year, not nine. Three-fourths of my salary would put me right in line what I understand to be the median Pittsburgh Public Schools teacher’s salary.
LikeLike
Siobhan, below if you figure that they don’t pay their retirement or health care.
LikeLike
I should shut my trap. I should shut my trap. Ugh. I can’t help it.
Professors in this area make in the $50,000 range and make less than K-12 teachers. They teach at small liberal arts colleges, not NYU Law school. This situation is probably due to weird local politics and isn’t a nation-wide situation.
But, let’s take those first median numbers of $35,000 v. $50,000. That’s a really small difference = $15,000. Considering what it takes to a PhD. I believe that 8 years is currently the average amount of time in grad school. And grad school is hell on wheels. Only a very small, select group actually make it through those programs. The academic pay scale should be closer to what other elite professions make in medicine or law.
In a perfect world, all salaries would be closer together than they are now. The market would play no role in determining pay. (Yes, I’m talking a perfect world.) The calculus for pay would be based on education, unique talents, investment, hard work, experience, and tolerance for doing icky or dangerous stuff. But that’s not how things work.
LikeLike
I may start a business tearing down abandoned homes. I’ve always wanted a job where I could smash things without having to say it was an accident. It’s bound to be a growth industry around here and I’m guessing I could make good money at it if I had some sort of a niche, like being the guy who disturbs the neighbors least or get certified for “No throwing asbestos in the Mon to saving dumping costs.”
LikeLike
Did you see the story about how Flint, MI has chosen to do away with (bulldoze) entire residential city blocks so that they can better focus on the upkeep, police presence, etc. — i.e. survival — of the ones that are still healthy?
LikeLike
“Did you see the story about how Flint, MI has chosen to do away with (bulldoze) entire residential city blocks so that they can better focus on the upkeep, police presence, etc. — i.e. survival — of the ones that are still healthy?”
Down south (Arizona, Nevada, Southern California), they are starting to do that with new subdivisions.
LikeLike
Laura and Siobhan,
I’ve been on both sides, college professor and K-12 teacher. Good 2nd grade teachers will put in the same hours as a top-notch professor. Granted the teachers don’t grade nearly as much, but they spend a lot more time lesson planning. Plus they have to keep up with developments in a whole lot of disparate fields (reading, math, social studies/history cultural studies). They also are on all kinds of committees, deal with parents a whole lot in ways college professors never have to, and often have to master new technologies at frightening rates. And then there are the student teachers, new teacher mentoring, and vomit. Further, I’m betting that almost all those teachers have MA plus 20s and a fair number have PhDs. The suburban NY districts (and a few others – Lower Merion, PA I’m looking at you!) are the Ivy Leagues of Public education. For the most part, only the best and brightest end up there. Is there deadwood there? Sure. But then again, there’s deadwood everywhere.
Your young professor friends want to afford a house? Move to Philly and get a new job. Surprisingly, academia prepares you for all kinds of careers; it justs destroys your confidence that you can do any of them. 😉
LikeLike