Life as a Professor

Here are a few answers to common questions about life as an accounting professor.

What do you do as a Professor?

Research

Accounting research is generally divided into type and methodology. The common types are financial, audit, managerial and tax. The common methodologies are analytical, archival, and experimental. Typically, financial and tax research uses the archival methodology, while audit and managerial tend to use experimental. Analytical can cover all three areas, but very few researchers do analytical work.

Teaching

There are several subject areas covered by accounting professors. The most common are financial and managerial accounting, audit, systems, and various tax classes. Most professors concentrate in one of these subject areas, although it is not uncommon for some to teach two or more at a time.

What do Accounting Professor get Paid?

Accounting professors are highly compensated. The AACSB conducts an annual faculty salary survey and reports the results. Numbers below are based on the 2008-2009 survey. The average salary of a recently hired accounting professor in 2008-2009 was $127,400. The average assistant professor earned $113,800, the average associate professor earned $114,900, and the average full professor earned $137,800. These salary numbers consider accounting professors at all types of universities and colleges. Salaries vary widely from this averages based on a number of different factors.

Salaries for accounting professors are usually higher if the employing school has a greater research reputation. Typical base salaries for accounting professors at a top 50 accounting research school start above $150,000 a year (and may start as high as $175,000). In addition to the base salary, many schools offer summer research support. The summer research support is quoted in ninths of the salary and the typical new professor at a research intensive university receives 2/9 of their salary as additional summer research support money. The combination of summer research support and base salary puts the total compensation arrangement above $200,000 a year for many of the new professors at these schools.

Salary information for individual professors at public universities is often released due to governmental disclosure regulations. The following links provide more explicit salary information:

• Salary information in Utah
• Salary information for state's that disclose this type of information.

In addition to salary, most schools offer some sort of retirement plan, health insurance package, and fringe benefits.

Diversity of Activities

One of the draws of being a college professor is that the professor gets to do a lot of different activities on a regular basis. During the year, a professor will teach classes, conduct research, attend accounting conferences, review others' research, mentor students, serve on university/college/department committees, and interact with professionals/regulators/standard setters. The diversity of the activities makes your job exciting and stimulating. It is easy to avoid getting stuck in a rut because you get to do lots of different things.

Intellectual Freedom

Being a professor is unique in that you get to learn and investigate issues and topics that you find interesting. There is relatively no structure put on the topics that you can research and learn about (other than you need to get tenure and so you need to publish some of the research). If you are a person that likes learning, then being a professor can be very rewarding.

Work Load

Professors work a similar number of hours as those in industry. Some people believe that once you have tenure, you can just show up for class and only work 20 hours a week. While there are a few people who may do this, most professors have greater integrity than this and continue to work to serve others.

The big difference between the hours that accounting professors and those in industry work is that a professor has greater ability to decide when they want to work. A professor must be in the classroom to teach and at scheduled meetings, but other than that there is great flexibility in when and where you work. Professors are graded on their output (i.e., articles published, teaching scores, service activities, etc.) and so what is important is that the work gets done, not where or what time of the day it gets done. That means a professor could leave at 1:00 in the afternoon to participate in an activity and either catch up by working earlier in the morning or later that evening. The flexibility that a professor has with time management is a very appealing part of the job.

A recent report indicates that full-time accounting faculty at four year institutions work on average 52 hours a week (as of 2004).

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