In a recent article in the Economist there is a bit of cherry-picked data, which highlights one of my biggest pet peeves:  painting all faculty with the same brush.  Here’s  a quote:

Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did.

Now, if you read the AAUP Salary Report (in particular, Table 4), you’ll see that yes indeed, full professors at R1 (Category 1, Doctoral institutions) make ~$135,000/year.  However, you need to keep reading.  At Cat IIA and IIB (Master’s and Bachelor’s institutions), full professors make ~$92,000/year.  That’s about a $40K or 43.7% (quickly approaching 50%) difference.

The variance in what it means to be a faculty member, both in responsibilities and compensation, is very high.

Now, two other points:

1. What about distribution of faculty?  Glad you asked.  See Table 13.  I was surprised, at first, that ~50% of faculty are at Cat I schools.  I thought that given the relatively few Cat I schools compared to many more Cat II, Cat III (and I don’t have those percentages – there may be a much higher percent of Cat I than I imagined), that there would be more Cat II/III faculty.  However, if you consider the size of each department (e.g., many smaller schools have 5-10 Math and CS faculty combined, while many Cat I schools will have 30-50 Math & CS faculty … plus Engineering, etc.).
2. To the main point of the original article (which is a critique of modern scientific practice and its incentive structure), the overwhelming majority of scientific publication is done by Cat I faculty.  So, while the statement made was false, the true statement “Full professors [at primarily research institutions] in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did” is both true and relevant to the article.