Timeline for UK faculty salaries are much lower than US – is there any upside?
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| Feb 14, 2022 at 17:52 | comment | added | EarlGrey | @JonathanReez Exactly! | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 15:20 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @EarlGrey that’s about as valid of an argument as saying moving to the US is a bad idea because your kids will get shot in school. Technically possible, statistically implausible. | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 11:18 | comment | added | EarlGrey | @JonathanReez I do not care that much about having excellent health insurance, if the median person sitting next to me in the BART cannot access the health system and are having (spreading) tubercolosis and they cannot cure it. (this was valid before Covid19, will be valid after Covid19 and will be valid for the next neoCovid). | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 10:32 | comment | added | Dmitry Savostyanov | @JonathanReez You could have made a more inclusive comment or at least indicate explicitly that the privileges of "excellent healthcare plans" only apply to top 20% of the applicants. Instead you continue your argument like the applicants who end up at the remaining 80% of schools do not exist or do not matter. | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 9:22 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Dmitry there’s entry level positions in Harvard and Stanford and MIT too. If you’re good enough to get an entry level job at Oxford (as a lot of Academia.SE users have) you’re probably good enough for a top tier US college as well. And those top tier colleges all have great healthcare plans where you don’t have to worry about anything. I don’t know the exact cut off but I suspect the top 20 colleges in the US should all have excellent healthcare plans. | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 9:15 | comment | added | Dmitry Savostyanov | @JonathanReez The question is asked from the perspective of an entry-level faculty, not an established professor. Your comments seem to target a different group of people, but you never indicated that. This is confusing, because many entry-level faculty in the US won't enjoy the same benefits as you do. | |
| Feb 14, 2022 at 4:33 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Dmitry there’s tons of people on Academia.SE with insane h-indexes or amazing research progress who could get any job in the world. I don’t want those people to potentially lose millions of dollars in lifetime compensation because of myths perpetuated over and over again on the Internet. They could choose to sacrifice those millions of course but then it’s an informed choice, not one based on myth. | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 22:45 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Relaxed you are right - most people in the US don’t have such a plan. But if you can get a job with such a plan (which applies to a large number of Academia.SE users), you should plug in the numbers and get the total annual expected income, rather than relying on abstract generic claims like “US healthcare is expensive and unpredictable!”. I think we can both agree that it’s important to have all the right facts and numbers in your head before making a choice. That choice might be to stay in Europe but it should be a fully informed choice. | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 22:41 | comment | added | Dmitry Savostyanov | @JonathanReez You are an established academic who is lucky to work in a top-tier University providing very good remuneration and benefits. Most entry-level academics in the US do not enjoy the same privileges. Perhaps, consider yourself lucky without dismissing an objective problem as a "myth". | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 22:10 | comment | added | Relaxed | @JonathanReez Not really, there are many other aspects to qualify of life and you should not only look at your current situation but also at how it constrains your future choices. That's not the most important thing, though, you're constantly begging the question with “top-level academics” and “good plans”. Most people having a $5000 yearly out-of-pocket maximum for out of network care is pure fantasy. And that's a lot to understand and to worry about, in a context where bills are objectively very high (your original “myth“). | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 21:21 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Relaxed my own plan includes both an in network and out of network yearly limit. So goes for the plan provided for employees of University of Washington. If you really want you can just assume you’ll hit the yearly out of pocket limit every year and use that number to calculate your expected income. Most peoples limit is at $5000/year for out of network - sounds like a lot until you realize that the pay differential is $50-100k/year after tax for a highly qualified academic employee. As mentioned above the **only** thing that matters is final expected amount of $$$ in your bank account. | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 10:25 | comment | added | Relaxed | @JonathanReez That's, again, not quite that easy. Not all plans have one and, even if things have improved with Obamacare, the limit is not insignificant. I assume many tech companies will offer a plan with an out-of-pocket maximum to their engineering staff (not necessarily to the customer support staff, contractors, or the gig-economy workers they arbitrarily defined as not being part of the staff) but that's only the beginning. The yearly out-of-pocket maximum is a cap on co-pays and deductibles for things that are covered in the first place, most importantly not out of network care… | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 3:10 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Relaxed the bills are unpredictable but every plan has a yearly out of pocket plan which is perfectly predictable. You do have to worry about it I guess but it would be well worth the differential in income for top tier academics. | |
| Feb 13, 2022 at 3:07 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Ian your health plan didn’t have a yearly out of pocket limit? Yeah you sometimes have to pay more but even if you hit the out of pocket limit you still get way more cash after tax than in Europe. Only thing that matters is final amount of $$$ in your account, everything else is a distraction. | |
| Feb 12, 2022 at 10:52 | comment | added | Ian Sudbery | @JonathanReez I worked at Harvard Medical School, and had one of the best heathcare plans around. I still had to pay $250/month out of my paycheck, on top of the $2000/month the employer was paying. And I still had to pay an alarming large co-pay when I went to the ER with chest pains and a numb arm. As a brit who had never paid a penny for any healthcare in my life, this was quite a shock. | |
| Feb 12, 2022 at 10:48 | comment | added | Ian Sudbery | @mgraham Its true that there is no tenure in the UK. However, the protections that tenure actaully grants are more or less the same as what are provided to all workers in the UK by law after 4 years. Now perhaps US institutions don't get rid of people as often as UK places do (although its still fairly rare - we are currently in an industrial dispute with my uni because they are abolishing a department for the first time in 50 years) - but legally the protections are the same. US unis can sack tenured staff for the right reasons, they just generally don't. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 22:52 | comment | added | Relaxed | Add to that the fact that academic careers are notoriously erratic (you admitted yourself even working at a university is not enough to know that will get something reasonable!) and you have already got a very different experience than that of the healthy 20-something engineers or double income couples you're chatting with. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 22:46 | comment | added | Relaxed | @JonathanReez It's definitely better for some but hiding behind "good healthcare plans” is kind of begging the question and “no true Scotsman“ argument. Even if you're in tech and you have a good coverage now, it matters in multiple ways. My experience goes beyond the tech community and it's definitely not the top 20% of earners who have nothing to worry about (how many people do you suppose work in tech?) The simple facts you're still dancing around is that (a) the bills are high and unpredictable and (2) you have to worry about what insurance you get. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 19:15 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @Relaxed I have extensive experience with the medical system in the US, my company work email has constant threads about insurance/hospitals, and insurance is one of my favorite topics of conversation within the tech community here. Worst story I've heard involved having to pay $3.5k out of pocket for childbirth and having to make 10 separate payments for it. All the bad stories that people hear on the other side of the pond are about companies/institutions without a good healthcare plan. American healthcare system is bad, but not for the top ~20% of earners. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 15:55 | comment | added | mgraham | There's not really such a thing as tenure if you're a lecturer in the UK. You have a permanent contract, sure, but that just means getting made redundant comes as a surprise rather than at a known date :-) . Since I started my first degree in '93 to finally leaving university employment for industry last month I studies/worked at universities where there was constant abolishing / closing-down of departments and accompanying removal of lecturers as subjects went in/out of fashion and student numbers dropped. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 11:36 | comment | added | Dmitry Savostyanov | @fgysin I am tring to avoid using academic jargon for the sake of clarity to people who may not be aware of its precise meaning. But thank you for this important contribution. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 8:52 | comment | added | Relaxed | @JonathanReez It's not a myth, it's a simple fact. Health insurance does not make bills lower, it just means your insurance is paying for them. US healthcare bills are not only high, they are also unpredictable. On top of that, US health insurance is notoriously difficult to navigate. For every person who got excellent care with reasonable out of pocket costs, you will find someone who thought they had good coverage and still got a large bill. That stress is much lower in European countries. | |
| Feb 11, 2022 at 7:43 | comment | added | fgysin |
and only one partner has a job offer at the moment of the move --> this is called the two-body-problem.
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| Feb 11, 2022 at 0:02 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @DmitrySavostyanov not all US Universities are equal, yes. You should make sure you get a good healthcare plan before signing the offer. | |
| Feb 10, 2022 at 23:59 | comment | added | Dmitry Savostyanov | @JonathanReez There are multiple accounts of PhD students and Assist Profs working at US Universities who discovered they are not covered by the health insurance. | |
| Feb 10, 2022 at 23:54 | comment | added | JonathanReez | US healthcare bills look exorbitant => they're really not if you have good health insurance. This is a very common myth that's unfortunately hard to dispel. If you work for a good institution/company you'll have good insurance. And as a European you don't care about things like getting cancer - worst case you just pack your bags and fly home. Europeans living in the US get to eat their cake and have it too in this regard :) | |
| S Feb 9, 2022 at 21:38 | history | suggested | Servaes | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Typo, and getting to edit minimum.
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| S Feb 9, 2022 at 20:46 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Feb 9, 2022 at 20:46 | comment | added | cag51♦ | Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. | |
| Feb 9, 2022 at 7:36 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Feb 9, 2022 at 21:38 | |||||
| Feb 8, 2022 at 22:12 | history | edited | Dmitry Savostyanov | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 8, 2022 at 17:44 | history | edited | Dawn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 8, 2022 at 17:25 | history | edited | Dmitry Savostyanov | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 8, 2022 at 13:48 | history | answered | Dmitry Savostyanov | CC BY-SA 4.0 |