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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most professors can't afford elite private schools in this area unless they come from family money or they have a spouse who makes much more[/quote]

Depends what subject they teach and where they teach.  [b]Tenured profs in general are overpaid these days, considering they get summers off. [/b] And law school profs do extremely well.  These are some of the sweetest gigs going.  [b]Plus, many schools pay full tuition or partial tuition to profs' kids wherever they go to college[/b].  Anyone who is not a tenured prof at a good school is...a sucker missing out on these perks and near-complete job security.  No wonder no one retires![/quote]

hilarious.  A few academic stars are overpaid; the rest work for decent but not overpaid salaries (50-100).  And there is no summer off - you might not be teaching, but you are writing, researching, catching up on administrative duties, directing graduate students, and prepping classes for the fall.  Every single tenured professor I know works at least 50 hour weeks  (maybe it goes to 40 some weeks in the summer), and I am not at a high pressure school.  At a RI school, 60-70 hour weeks, 50 in the summer would be the norm.  Seriously, 10-12 hour days are the just a matter of course at many points in the semester. There is a lot of work to do!  I can't work on weekends anymore because of kids (and you can't just take a weekend off and do your job with any semblance of well), so I work till 2 am.  Professors don't retire because they have worked like this for years and so work is their identity.

Your kids can get free tuition at the school you teach at and, IF your school is in certain tuition consortiums, they can get free tuition at another school but only IF someone from that school comes to your school.  The schools in the consortium with ours are pretty third tier - just a couple I'd be excited to send my kids to but I'd only be able  o if someone at the good school wants to come to my little second tier school (i.e. not likely).  The option of a free college tuition at a crappy university (mine) is a nice fall back, but I'm still saving for college.[/quote]

Well, I guess I'm a slacker, but I view my tenured professorship as an extraordinarily well paid and secure part-time job. Honestly, if you are working 60-70 hours/week post tenure that's because you're nuts. I do work a lot -- but mostly b/c I do a lot of "extracurricular," non-university-based work that I took on voluntarily. No one makes me do it -- I do it b/c I like it.

[/quote]

I have several friends who are academics. Most of them do work constantly, but they have always been like that, as long as I've known them (since college/grad school). They are great worker bees, always nose to the grindstone no matter what is going on. The work is never done, not because it can't be done but because they never [i]decide[/i] that they are done. Think about it: when you were in college, there was really no end to the studying you could do. You could always read another suggested reading, reread a chapter, review your notes again. At some point most people stop, deciding that the marginal return on additional studying isn't worth the additional effort. But some people never feel done, and they continue wringing their hands until time runs out. Most of the academics I know are like this. They wo  all the time and constantly feel stressed, but much of that pressure is internal. It's not the job. It's them.[/quote]

well, it's not a sweet gig if to get the gig, you have to be the type of person who will never take advantage of a sweet gig.

But I don't fit the description above. I'm able to let things go and to half-ass something, and I still have 50-60 hours of work to do a week (in fact, I half-ass things because I have too work  to be able to be a perfectionist about it).  Maybe it is a different in disciplines.  In liberal arts, we always think those business professors are slackers.  Can't for the life of me get anyone from the business school to serve on one of the university wide committees I'm on.  hmmmm[/quote]

That's because they have practical concerns and better things to do--like spend their higher salaries.[/quote]

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