Despite our big 2016 sales tax increase, South Dakota’s K-12 teacher pay remains a disappointing 48th in the nation. Our elementary and high school teachers can get a significant raise if they get their doctorates and teach at university, but they’ll still be among the lowest paid professionals in their field. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (yes, give me data, and I can write all week), full professors at South Dakota’s public doctoral institutions ranks 48th in the nation.
Average Professor Pay at Public Doctoral Institutions
| State | Professor | Associate Professor | Assistant Professor | All |
| Iowa | $130,824 | $95,107 | $81,146 | $97,513 |
| Minnesota | $137,220 | $96,450 | $84,479 | $104,195 |
| Montana | $87,921 | $69,677 | $64,099 | $71,420 |
| Nebraska | $118,000 | $77,098 | $79,357 | $87,487 |
| North Dakota | $109,088 | $84,804 | $72,253 | $80,302 |
| South Dakota | $95,921 | $77,297 | $70,246 | $72,788 |
| Wyoming | $114,889 | $81,454 | $77,365 | $83,804 |
| United States | $128,202 | $89,125 | $77,154 | $91,502 |
Full professors in South Dakota average $95,921, more than double the $46,979 the average K-12 teacher gets. Count all professors—full, associate, and assistant—and South Dakota’s average prof pay is $72,788, also 48th in the nation. That latter figure is 79.5% of the national average professor pay… similar to how our average K-12 teacher pay is 78.7% of the national average.
While K-12 teachers transferring from Minnesota to South Dakota take an average 18% pay cut, professors leaving Minnesota for South Dakota will on average lose a tick over 30%. But, unlike the case with K-12 teachers, our professors aren’t rock-bottom in the region. Our Regental system manages to at least beat Montana in paying its academics.
You may notice one oddity in the data above: the average pay for all profs is greater than the average pay for associate profs everywhere but South Dakota and North Dakota, suggesting that outside the Dakotas, the prof pool consists more heavily of more highly credentialed, more experienced, and thus more highly paid full professors. South Dakota’s average prof pay is only 3.6% better than the average pay for the low-end assistant profs, suggesting that our university faculty consist predominantly of greener and thus cheaper academics.
These dismal stats are indicative of lazy legislators claiming “smaller government and lower taxes” as an excuse for not building and maintaining. Give a classroom of students the right to claim “Smaller Education” as an excuse for not doing their homework and see how much gets done. South Dakota has become like that run down farmhouse you avoid driving by when you have visitors from out of town. It’s time for a change in Pierre.
It makes sense that Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska have the highest pay rate. They are high-rated research universities and the populations of those states are the largest of the 7. The other 4 have quite small populations.
Another important aspect is how education is valued in each state. It’s very important in MN and 8 years of Democratic governorship has kept it that way. The Russpublican predecessor damaged our educational system on all levels but Gov. Dayton rebuilt it.
Budgets are moral documents and they show what a government’s/political party’s values are.
SD Russpublicans clearly signal that they care very little for the education of the states’ average (not wealthy) citizen or the citizens who work in the field of education on any level except vo-tech instructors. Clerks, janitors, secretaries, etc are all part of the poorly paid labor force, in addition to the educators themselves.