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I have seen several questions pertaining to the salaries of professors in the United States. Is there any research/study/survey/... that looked at the non-salary income computer science academics (professors, research scientists, …) make in the United States?

By non-salary income I mean any income that doesn't come from the salary. Examples of income source: teaching outside the university, cash from awards, running a side start-up/business, consulting, sitting on boards of directors, giving talks, book royalties, patent royalties. Ideally, the non-salary income should be broken down by the income source.

Psychonaut
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Franck Dernoncourt
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    I can't imagine how this information could be useful, because individual variation is very high and non-salary income has little relationship with being a computer science professor. Surely the most common kind of non-salary income is from investments unrelated to computer science. – Anonymous Physicist Sep 04 '16 at 08:49
  • Maybe try the workplace site. Also, why do you want to know? – aparente001 Sep 05 '16 at 23:00
  • @AnonymousPhysicist I'm mostly interested in non-salary income related to the academic's expertise. – Franck Dernoncourt Sep 06 '16 at 00:50
  • I've never heard of anyone doing such a survey, but if anyone has, it would probably be one of AAUP, ACM, IEEE. I would look at them. – Nate Eldredge Sep 06 '16 at 16:59
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    Should this be closed? Doesn't seem to be any immediate and reasonable way to find an answer to this. – G-E Nov 16 '16 at 10:56
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    @G-E surveys can be done. – Franck Dernoncourt Nov 16 '16 at 12:19
  • @FranckDernoncourt yes indeed, but that's beyond a question and answer on here, isn't it? – G-E Nov 16 '16 at 17:07
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    @G-E maybe there already exists a survey on it – Franck Dernoncourt Nov 16 '16 at 22:47
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    @G-E - Based on the upvotes, it seems that the community interpreted this as Frank stated... this is a request for someone to call out any existing research on this topic. This is not a request for someone to go and do any new research. – eykanal Nov 21 '16 at 04:06
  • @AnonymousPhysicist: Would you argue the same for a law professor, or a professor in medicine? If not, then it may not be immediately obvious, at least to OP, whether ("on average") a computer scientist professor could also have sources of income other than his position at university, completely unrelated things like being invested in the stock market aside. – RQM Nov 30 '16 at 10:30
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    In mathematics the median is probably 0, and the mean below 100$ per year. One professor got his book royalties in form of a cheque over 26 pounds, and wondered whether caching a pound denominated cheque in Germany would cost less than 26 pounds in fees. Another professor got several thousand Euros for a highly successful textbook, but this amount has to be spread out over ~10 years. More substantial is non-monetary income. The average professor gets several hundreds in form of free meals, complimentary books and the like. This implies that meaningful research is intrinsically difficult. – Jan-Christoph Schlage-Puchta Dec 29 '16 at 17:04
  • @Jan-ChristophSchlage-Puchta: Thanks for the feedback. FYI If an author does not intend to make much revenue from a book, why not make it open-access? – Franck Dernoncourt Dec 29 '16 at 17:06
  • The publisher adds value to a book, at least in the form of marketing and distribution, and ideally in counseling and proof reading. Even if your contract with the publisher allows putting your book on your website, this could feel like cheating the publisher. If you do not involve a major publisher, you have to rely on word of mouth marketing and are not present in any library. – Jan-Christoph Schlage-Puchta Dec 29 '16 at 17:16

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No, there has been no survey of CS professors' non-salary incomes. We can't prove a negative, but you and I both, and presumably others here, have tried to look it up and found nothing. The likeliest reason is that the research has not yet been done.

Despite the highly upvoted comment about the information being useless, if anyone reading this is interested in performing the income study, I will volunteer to be one of the datapoints.

Aaron Brick
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