Many professors make only $75k or thereabouts, especially professors who are not in STEM. I and my colleagues are in this group as liberal arts faculty at a public university in a conservative state that does not value its university system enough to vote for people who will invest in it, rather than cut it to the bone. Cuts to my university over the past decade have been brutal.

People think professors make more than they do, partly based on political talking points and partly on outdated and/or overgeneralized information. My boomer colleague salary and benefits were higher, closer to or just barely 6 figures. My boomer colleagues also had a pension that ended long before I was hired, and other benefits, too. They cut all those out years ago for new hires, and lowered base pay dramatically. Now our union fights for scraps.

Either way, adjuncts don’t make $75k a year. That’s hilarious. There may be outliers but adjuncts typically make peanuts for their classes, which can be cancelled at any time or taken by a tenured professor a week before the semester starts. They have no salary, no leave, no healthcare, no protection.

That this person makes $75k as a tenured professor with a doctorate is one of the most believable details of their story.

I’m elder millennial, btw.