Professor / College Faculty
Also known as: College Professor, University Professor, Academic, Faculty Member, Lecturer
Teach courses, conduct original research, mentor students, and publish findings at colleges and universities.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for professor / college facultys.
About 1 in 1,000 reaches this level
About 1.68M postsecondary teachers in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 25-1000, 2025); endowed chairs at elite business, law, or medical schools earning $500K+ total comp number roughly 1,000-1,500 — about 0.1%.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a doctoral/professional degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
A research PhD pays you rather than the other way round: 80.7% of 2024 doctorate recipients say their main support was a teaching assistantship, a research assistantship or a fellowship, and in science and engineering it is 85.5%. Three-quarters (73.4%) finished with no graduate debt at all; in physical sciences and engineering it is 85.7% and 83.2%. NSF's own graduate fellowship pays $37,000 a year in 2026, and department stipends typically run $25,000-$45,000. The cost is not money, it is roughly six to eight years past your bachelor's on a student income. One caveat on the headline: 15% of 2024 doctorate recipients funded themselves, and that share is much higher outside science and engineering - read "typically funded" as the norm in the sciences, not a promise in the humanities or education.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Professors teach, grade, advise students, and do research and write it up. On paper, few jobs overlap more with what AI chatbots do. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with ranked 785 jobs, and 30 of its 35 college-teacher categories landed in the top 100; business and economics teachers were 17th and 27th. Colleges are buying in: Inside Higher Ed reported in March 2026 that the California State University system paid OpenAI $17 million to give ChatGPT to all its students and staff, and, citing Bloomberg, that OpenAI had sold more than 700,000 licenses to about 35 public universities.
So far that has not turned into AI taking professors' jobs. Faculty are angry about where the money goes: San Francisco State, part of the Cal State system, cut 615 lecturer positions over two years during a budget crisis, and at the University of Colorado, which signed a $2 million-a-year OpenAI deal while some campuses faced cuts, a professor told Inside Higher Ed: "It is not that AI is taking our jobs per se, but that AI is being prioritized over many of our jobs." At Arizona State, the faculty senate president said they "haven't seen any cuts to faculty engagement, salaries or hiring." BLS projects college teaching jobs to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all jobs, with about 103,300 openings a year as more students enroll.
The hard part of this career is older than AI. BLS expects colleges to hire "more part-time teachers" to meet demand, with "a limited number" of full-time and tenure positions. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that 68% of US faculty held contingent (off the tenure track) appointments in fall 2021, and 48% worked part time. We are lowering this from 4 to 3: AI can do a meaningful share of the tasks, and the entry path to a secure job is already narrow, but we found no evidence of colleges cutting teaching jobs because of AI. The old 4 rested on claims about AI tutors and AI grading replacing staff that its sources did not support.
What would change this score. If colleges start replacing course sections or adjunct teachers with AI-taught courses, or BLS cuts its growth projection, this goes back to 4.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
Related Careers
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