Full-time online professor pay

I see a high risk developing within academia. The industry can have a serious backlash, from the general public and even a government response. Law schools come to mind, as in the last decade they churned out JDs. Law schools sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly suggest almost guaranteed high income jobs. Yet, the glut of lawyers is so high, many are willing to take paralegal or unpaid, long internships just to get their foot in the door. Politicians smell blood and there is a high chance they will "fix" the problems by some legislature.

Why are they churning out all these doctorates? The purpose of tenured positions, as far as I understand is to give an opportunity to allow for research. The research is there to allow the college to sell the patents, licenses, copyrights, etc. It used to be a critical income stream.

This is not the case with distance education. The cost of administering a DL class compared to a B&M class is fractional. I see the DL class trend to go even further to the point of fully automated process. There is no real need for even a Master's degreed individual to manage many 100, 200, and maybe even 300 level courses. I can see a fully-automated undergraduate degree in the future, with no highly educated, let alone "doctors" involved.

So, I believe the fewer tenured positions are at least indirectly, because the successful income stream of distance learning.

Just a thought.

 

You have brought an interesting topic, I agree that there is no need for a doctorate to teach a canned course that was designed by someone else.

Accreditation requirements require a PhD to teach Master's level courses and a Master to teach Bachelor level courses but these requirements were written long time ago before internet was available.

I worked for a University in Canada that offers online courses to 3000 students per section. They hire one PhD to manage 10 Teaching assistants to help to teach the course.

If the same model is followed by other schools, you just need few PhDs to teach thousands of students.

A for profit school might follow the same model, have just one PhD that supervises BS graduates that will be the ones grading the assignments and answering questions. The PhD might be just available to moderate discussions and answer difficult questions.
This model can make even more profits and would make PhDs even less needed. The accreditation agency should not have problems as in paper the teacher is the PhD but the TAs as the ones grading and answering questions as normal TAs do at B&M schools.

 

We can always take the south of the border PhD route.....:shhh:

 

This is what happens during many of Liberty's intensives.

 

Here is the pay at my local community college for full-time in-resident professors:

Lecturer 38,217
Instructor 38,217 to 43,344
Assistant Professor to 44,955 50,723
Associate Professor to 52,613 59,015
Professor 61,178 to 77,892

 

Need to look closer

I tried the payscale site and @ $115k I was only in the 41% as a Info Security Manager.