Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Let me "represent to you" the actual topic of this post ("professors") and the actual data, which demonstrates that a tiny slice of all econ post-secondary educators make 200k.
Your first posts stated that it was laughable that a new econ professor would make more than $125K; I corrected you with relevant data and personal experience. Then you chose to pick a fight with me on one of the very few topics I know more about than all but a couple of thousand people alive! And it's fine if you don't believe me; perhaps I'm simply a crazy person who impersonates an economics professor in his/her spare time. I guess it's fine if you don't believe the Cawley study I linked to either; perhaps he's a crazy person who makes up data when he's not busy with his Cornell duties. Same for
this paper, which has a detailed description of the economics job market (table 9 lists new PhD salary quartiles for various types of jobs in 2010 dollars).
I was interested in posting some of this information because I don't think people realize that a PhD can be a pretty decent investment, depending on field. I'm not disputing (nor confirming) tales of impoverished humanities PhDs struggling to make ends meet while adjuncting. But this simply does not exist for economics PhD students, including those graduating from the weakest programs. As with other relatively well-compensated fields, this is because of relatively richer private sector opportunities.
At any rate, I defer to you for the last word.