A two-month-old article, but worth posting:
The Price Professors Pay for Teaching at Public Universities
Private institutions offer more, and the gap is becoming unbridgeable
By SCOTT SMALLWOOD
You're a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It's a prestigious university with big-time resources and colleagues. What are these perks worth to you? Maybe $10,000 a year? What about Madison's low crime rate? Or its small-town charm brightened with intellectual liveliness, a rare combination that nabs it a berth on many best-places-to-live lists? Is that worth another $10,000 a year? Is Madison's fabulousness -- what one professor calls "the lake effect" -- worth half a million dollars over the length of your career?
Because that's the difference, on average, between toiling at Madison, a public university, and being a professor at, say, Northwestern University, a private research university of similar prestige. You don't even have to go to a top Ivy to get those extra thousands. Northwestern is just one of 11 top privates that pay $25,000 more on average to full professors than does Wisconsin, where they earn an average of $90,000 per year.
Twenty years ago, teaching at a top public university like Wisconsin didn't mean living a few notches down on the pay scale. The publics and privates paid comparable salaries. Time and changes in the American economy have carved a gap between the two, a gap so large that one researcher now wonders whether it can ever close up again.
more:
http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i32/32a01801.htmNote that the chart is for FULL professors at Carnegie Research Category I universities (probably because this is the category for which they have the most complete dataset). Associate and Assistant Professors make considerably less, and Instructors usually even less. And moving just a notch or two down in the Carnegie scale means moving down in salary as well. The numbers for the Private, Carnegie Research I, Full Professors are the highest in the country.