It's a little tough to generalize about salary in academia. Obviously, a 'professor' covers multiple ranks in the academic hierarchy, but if you look at the pu

It's a little tough to generalize about salary in academia. Obviously, a 'professor' covers multiple ranks in the academic hierarchy, but if you look at the published pay scales for assistant professors (I believe the lowest professor ranking with tenure) at University of California, it looks like large majority of them are breaking $100k [1]. I don't see a way of breaking those results into discipline, I'd imagine that those individuals in fields like CS vs. more academia-exclusive fields like literature or geography (relatively, anyway) are making towards the higher scale of that. Some of them in with clearly medical-related title are making much more, but I think that's to be expected. Also, it's possible I'm mistaken, but I believe professors are allowed to be paid to act as advisors or "resources" for external organizations to act as a secondary revenue stream? Combined with topping off their salary with research grants as you pointed out, and the nice perks academia offers if you can get tenure (job security, etc.), I'm not sure that even this data fully encapsulates compensation either way [1] https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ (type in "asst prof" to title search, with ALL location selected)