Nature has an article, Pay for US postdocs varies wildly by institution. True, but as Matt Hahn, professor of biology at Indian University in Bloomington (cost of living 93% of the USA average) observed there isn’t any correction for cost of living. The researcher who dug through the data actually posted it online, so I decided to correct that oversight.
I took the institutions with N > 20, and looked up the cost of living in Best Places. The plot above is messy, but you can see that lots of institutions are paying a standard median salary of around $47,500, no matter the cost of living.
The correlation between cost of living and postdoc salary is 0.39. The weighted correlation is 0.48. These are pretty modest. That means you can find a really good situation, or a really bad one (also, institution reputation matters, there are some gems which pay well and have great reputations from what I can tell!).
Also, I’m pretty sure that the situation is worse than the numbers above suggest. Looking at the list of universities it seems there’s a bias for institutions at high cost of living locations not to want to report their salary data I think. Aside from UCSB the whole UC system denied the attempt to get data, and I don’t see Stanford, Columbia, or Harvard on the list.
The full table is below the fold, but adjusted for cost of living UCSB postdocs get $20,866 per year. In contrast, Michigan State, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and Wayne State University postdocs make more than $60,000 per year when you adjust. Stanford isn’t on the list, but online it says Stanford postdocs make between the low $50,000 to low $60,000 range, which seems reasonable for life sciences, though definitely poverty wages where the university is located (though if you are in a lucrative field it can be more, and depending on your supervisor outside consulting is a possibility, though good luck living in Silicon Valley on a $100,000 yearly gross income if you have a family, as many postdocs do).
| School | N | Median salary | Cost of Living | Adjusted |
| University of California Santa Barbara | 283 | $53,000 | 254 | $20,866 |
| University of Washington Seattle | 1070 | $50,772 | 177 | $28,685 |
| Boston University | 297 | $49,200 | 170 | $28,941 |
| University of Colorado Boulder | 22 | $52,000 | 178 | $29,213 |
| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 65 | $27,515 | 89 | $30,916 |
| State University of New York Stony Brook | 31 | $47,000 | 139 | $33,813 |
| University of North Carolina Chapel Hill | 432 | $47,484 | 131 | $36,247 |
| University of Colorado Denver | 314 | $47,476 | 128 | $37,091 |
| Rutgers University | 539 | $46,000 | 123 | $37,398 |
| University of Michigan Ann Arbor | 1159 | $47,054 | 122 | $38,569 |
| State University of New York Albany | 20 | $39,945 | 101 | $39,550 |
| Purdue University | 407 | $38,896 | 96 | $40,517 |
| University of Texas Austin | 464 | $48,000 | 117 | $41,026 |
| University of Minnesota Twin Cities | 697 | $44,804 | 109 | $41,105 |
| University of Massachusetts Medical School | 360 | $44,556 | 107 | $41,641 |
| University of Virginia | 302 | $47,500 | 113 | $42,035 |
| University of Utah | 387 | $47,484 | 108 | $43,967 |
| University of Texas San Antonio | 53 | $42,000 | 93 | $45,161 |
| University of Maryland College Park | 448 | $56,000 | 122 | $45,902 |
| University of Texas Arlington | 49 | $45,000 | 97 | $46,392 |
| University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston | 229 | $47,476 | 102 | $46,545 |
| North Carolina State University | 431 | $47,476 | 102 | $46,545 |
| University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center | 150 | $47,844 | 102 | $46,906 |
| University of Iowa | 241 | $47,476 | 101 | $47,006 |
| Texas A&M | 185 | $46,350 | 97 | $47,784 |
| University of Cincinnati | 134 | $41,157 | 86 | $47,857 |
| Iowa State University | 43 | $47,476 | 99 | $47,956 |
| University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston | 137 | $47,484 | 98 | $48,453 |
| University of Texas Southwestern | 527 | $47,268 | 95 | $49,756 |
| Florida State University | 140 | $47,659 | 95 | $50,167 |
| University of Arizona | 275 | $47,659 | 95 | $50,167 |
| University of Texas El Paso | 43 | $42,191 | 84 | $50,227 |
| University of Texas Dallas | 53 | $48,000 | 95 | $50,526 |
| University of South Florida | 121 | $47,659 | 94 | $50,701 |
| University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio | 52 | $47,476 | 93 | $51,049 |
| University of Indiana Bloomington | 154 | $47,476 | 93 | $51,049 |
| University of Florida | 606 | $47,476 | 92 | $51,604 |
| University of Maryland Baltimore | 267 | $47,244 | 90 | $52,493 |
| University of Indiana Indianapolis | 200 | $47,476 | 90 | $52,751 |
| The Ohio State University | 617 | $47,484 | 84 | $56,529 |
| Michigan State University | 469 | $47,476 | 78 | $60,867 |
| University of Maryland Baltimore County | 24 | $55,688 | 90 | $61,876 |
| Wayne State University | 110 | $45,000 | 72 | $62,500 |
My son is ABD in Applied Math. This why he is not interested in academia. He wants to make real money, and not hobble from post-doc to post-doc hoping to latch on somewhere. Therefore, he has set his sights on a job in industry.
Re: UC-Boulder. Lots of post-docs there would commute from metro Denver on a fairly nice regional express bus which with a yearly pass that isn’t very expensive, is almost as fast as driving (the buses use express lanes and are allowed to drive in the shoulder when traffic is slow), and allows you to work or attend to your personal life going and leaving. Bus service in Boulder itself is very good. The trip is 45-50 minutes at rush hour, and closer to 35-40 minutes each way if you live in northwestern suburbs of Denver and you have the flexibility to avoid rush hour which lots of post-docs would. At a metro Denver cost of living plus the cost of a bus pass, your post-doc pay is lot more manageable, although Denver is slowly catching up with Boulder in housing prices.
I am neutral on this. Just thrown in the variables and see what come out. And then enumerate the regressions to get the most significant parsimonial fit by dropping variables that are not significant. No doubt university adminstrators will have done similar analysis.
The criterion is the Weighted Fractional Count (WFC) of reputable scienfic papers published calculated by NatureIndex.com which is owned by the Nature publishing house. (Though I should have used the one for life sciences which I currently do not have rather than the overall score.) The objective is the aged old question of quality or quanty of postdocs. I also did not try hard enough to match the university names to the WFC scores, only included 35 data points.
The picture is bleak for postdocs. The result is negatively correlated to the median AdjSalary but positively correlated to total postdoc Employment cost EmpCost=N*Salary. That means university will go for higher number of postdocs with lower salaries and the resulting higher level of competitions rather than elite complacency. However there could be long term disadvantages with this.
—–
lm(formula = WFC15 ~ N + Salary + AdjSal + EmpCost)
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 2.828e+02 1.045e+02 2.705 0.01114 *
N -7.648e-02 3.133e-01 -0.244 0.80884
Salary -2.145e-03 2.133e-03 -1.006 0.32257
AdjSal -3.036e-03 8.601e-04 -3.530 0.00136 **
EmpCost 5.148e-06 6.368e-06 0.808 0.42520
—
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 44.47 on 30 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.6649, Adjusted R-squared: 0.6203
F-statistic: 14.88 on 4 and 30 DF, p-value: 8.261e-07
—–
lm(formula = WFC15 ~ AdjSal + EmpCost)
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 1.826e+02 3.882e+01 4.704 4.69e-05 ***
AdjSal -2.998e-03 8.205e-04 -3.654 0.000916 ***
EmpCost 3.381e-06 5.521e-07 6.123 7.60e-07 ***
—
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 43.96 on 32 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.6508, Adjusted R-squared: 0.629
F-statistic: 29.82 on 2 and 32 DF, p-value: 4.887e-08
So, the race to the bottom of the ramen noodle survival brigade continues.
Why become an academic at all?
Eff the life of the mind.
Go and get some money, and then read what you like when you are old.
High pressure unless you are a star.
In so much of life we teach perseverance as a great virtue, when understanding the game is a better option- you waste much less time in your life with that- if the institution is set up to suck, then why endure it with salary of an assistant hardware store manager?
Grad school was a great enlightener. I was not willing to suck up and play the games, and so I left.
In some ways it was a great choice.