Canadian Professors Continue to Earn High Salaries

by E Wayne Ross on May 17, 2009

The Chronicle News Blog: Canadian Professors Continue to Earn High Salaries

Full-time Canadian professors earn, on average, $86,000 to $132,000 in U.S. dollars, according to a preliminary report on faculty salaries issued today by Statistics Canada.

The data in the report represent a snapshot of salaries on October 1, 2008. The report says: “It should be noted that many factors can influence salaries, including qualifications and number of years teaching. As well, some universities impose a maximum to the salary range for each rank while others have an open-ended scale.”

The highest-paid professors, according to the report, are at the University of British Columbia, and the lowest are at Cape Breton University. The report contains data from only 27 of the 116 institutions that were included in the 2006-7 salary survey, the most recent with final results compiled by the statistics agency.

The Canadian university system is mostly publicly financed and has a reputation for paying full-time faculty members well, partly because most of them are unionized. Starting salaries in Canadian higher education are the highest in the world, according to a report comparing 15 countries that was issued last year by Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. —Karen Birchard