I was browsing through some Statistics Canada data on university salaries the other day, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that there have been few decades in which it was better to be a prof than the last one. As the following table shows, over the years 2001 to 2009 (the years for which I could get good-quality data from Statscan for free – this email’s not paying a paying gig unfortunately), pay for full professors in non-medical disciplines across Canada rose at a rate very close to three times the rate of inflation, and about 85% faster than the average Canadian wage.

Change 2001 to 2009

There was some variation across institutions, of course. Generally speaking, pay increases were slightly higher at large institutions, and were definitely larger the further west one goes. But there was no university where the increase in salary was less than the increase in the national average wage. To put it another way, it’s a perfect Lake Wobegon situation, in that all professors are above-average.

Above-average, but not table-topping. Academics didn’t fare quite as well over the last decade as people from the “forestry, fishing, mining oil and gas category” – miners in particular have made out like bandits since about 2004. But they did fare substantially better than some other employment categories against which they might plausibly be measured: Finance/Real Estate (37%), Educational Services (27%) and especially Professional, Scientific & Technical (3%) (curious what STEM advocates have to say about that last one? Me too).

Increase in Average Nominal Earnings, by Occupation Sector, 2001 to 2009

(If you’re wondering how academics as a whole can be up 42% when every individual rank is up by more than that – it’s a composition issue. Proportionately, there are a lot more junior rank professors than there used to be, and that drags the average down.)

Now the obvious retort here is that by using the lens of a decade, I’m distorting the longer-term picture. To a considerable extent, the rapid rises of last decade were a reaction to the 1990s, when academic salaries rose by slightly less than inflation. That’s somewhat persuasive if you’re comparing academic salaries to inflation – less so to average wages, which also took a beating in the 1990s.

The cause of this? It’s not a drying up of supply – PhDs are being pumped out faster than ever. Nor, as we have seen, is it competition in the private sector – quite the opposite since professional/scientific wages were so weak. In fact, it’s really hard to avoid the conclusion that the cause is simply availability of government funding. The 90s were a decade of restraint and the 00s weren’t – and salaries changed accordingly.