By no means was I trying to say that professors aren't well rewarded, if that's how I came across, I didn't communicate very effectively. My point was mainly t

By no means was I trying to say that professors aren't well rewarded, if that's how I came across, I didn't communicate very effectively. My point was mainly that there aren't very many of those high paying positions relative to the number of graduates in the field. The ratio of graduates : professors is not too different than the ratio of CS grads : CS professors, but unlike CS, biology doesn't have nearly as many high paying positions outside of the professorial field. Even within education, many very good life scientists have a hard time obtaining tenure. Most jobs outside of education pay somewhere around 60k, and there isn't a whole lot of room for growth unless you move up into management at a biotech firm. This is in contrast to CS, where a non-manager software engineer has a pretty decent opportunity to make 6 figures if he works hard enough and has a decent level of talent.