Search "colleges with the highest faculty salaries" and most of what comes back is either years out of date or mixes law schools, medical centers, and universities into one list that doesn't actually compare like with like. Real, current data exists -- it just needs two caveats attached that most lists skip.

The real number, and where it actually comes from

The authoritative source here is the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Faculty Compensation Survey, run annually and covering hundreds of institutions. AAUP doesn't publish a free public ranking itself, but institutional research offices at major universities regularly build peer-comparison reports directly from AAUP's data -- the one behind this article is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's own Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, comparing Research (R1) and AAU-member universities for the 2024-25 academic year, sourced explicitly to AAUP's 2024-25 Faculty Compensation Survey.

By average full professor salary, the top of that list:

  1. Stanford University — $318,500
  2. Columbia University — $316,800
  3. Princeton University — $314,700
  4. Harvard University — $314,500
  5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology — $292,800
  6. University of Chicago — $287,600
  7. Yale University — $283,200
  8. University of California-Los Angeles — $282,900

For context, U.S. full professors averaged $163,836 nationally in AAUP's most recent full survey -- so the top of this list is paying roughly double the national full-professor average.

Caveat one: this list isn't "every college," and that's deliberate

This specific comparison covers 120 Research-1 and AAU-member universities -- large, research-intensive institutions. It doesn't include liberal arts colleges, regional universities, or community colleges, which AAUP's broader survey (roughly 768 institutions in total) does track but which this particular peer-comparison table wasn't built to include. A "highest faculty salary" claim that includes, say, a small liberal arts college or a specialized professional school is drawing from a different, less comparable dataset -- worth checking what universe of schools any list you find is actually drawing from before trusting a ranking.

Caveat two: "faculty salary" without a rank attached is close to meaningless

The single biggest reason vague "highest paid professors" lists mislead: rank changes the number enormously, and a school's relative position can shift depending which rank you're looking at. At UCLA, for example, full professors rank 8th nationally among R1/AAU schools at $282,900 -- but UCLA's assistant professors rank 15th at $134,900, a gap of nearly $148,000 within the same institution. Nationally, AAUP's 2025-26 data put average salaries at $92,094 for assistant professors, $106,216 for associate professors, and $155,056 for full professors -- assistant professors, typically the newest hires without tenure, earn roughly 60% of what full professors do. A headline "$X average faculty salary" figure that doesn't specify which rank -- or blends all ranks together -- is telling you much less than it appears to.

Two things the raw dollar figures don't adjust for

Cost of living. Every school in the top 8 sits in one of the country's most expensive metro areas -- the Bay Area, New York City, Princeton/greater Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New Haven, and Los Angeles. A $318,500 salary in Palo Alto and a $180,000 salary in a lower-cost metro don't convert to the same standard of living; the nominal-dollar gap overstates the real purchasing-power gap between top-paying and mid-tier schools.

Public vs. private, generally. Across AAUP's full national dataset (not just this R1/AAU comparison), full professors at private independent institutions averaged $205,000 versus $154,000 at public institutions in the most recent survey -- a real, persistent gap, though UCLA and UC Berkeley both still crack the R1/AAU top 20 on the strength of California's cost of living and UC system scale.

What this means for you

  • A single "average faculty salary" number, without a stated rank, is close to uninterpretable. Ask (or look for) the rank-specific figure -- full, associate, or assistant -- before treating any comparison as meaningful.
  • Check what universe of schools a "highest paid" list is drawing from. A ranking that includes law schools, medical centers, or a mix of institution types alongside traditional universities isn't comparing like with like, the way the Higher Ed Dive-style lists that circulate online often do.
  • High average faculty pay is a research-university signal, not a teaching-quality guarantee. It reflects a school's ability to compete for research faculty in expensive academic labor markets -- similar to how student-faculty ratio sounds like a clean number but hides real ambiguity in how it's calculated. Neither number, on its own, tells you what your actual undergraduate classroom experience will look like.
  • Cost of living eats into nominal salary gaps. Don't read the raw dollar difference between a Bay Area school and a lower-cost-of-living school as the real gap in what that salary can buy.

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