Public college professor, good HDHP with $750 employer contribution to a family HSA ($350 for a single), which is nearly enough to cover the premium. $3,000 deductible for family, $6,000 max out of pocket. Fairly stable pension plan with healthcare in retirement (for me, not for more recent hires) paid 70% by the university system; family is also covered if they were covered while employed. 403(b) and 457 available, but no matching (we put a little over 5% into the pension, and they put 11%, I believe). Pension vests in ten years, individual accounts vest immediately.
Hours change every semester depending on teaching schedule, over which I have some limited control (input is probably closer to the truth). As a general rule I'm on campus four days a week for 8-12 hours depending on what's going on, then work 6-8 hours on the off day and 2-4 on weekends. Average is about 50-60 hours a week.
8 sick days a year, no specific vacation. Most faculty have two months off in the summer, but since I'm in a split role, no summer off and no vacation. The college is closed two weeks in December, though, and my summers generally involve only one or two trips to campus per week and 40 hours a week.
Some travel is required/ strongly encouraged, and the rare semester teaching on a distant satellite campus; mileage to that campus is reimbursed, other travel is covered.
The positives are how much control I have over what I do and when -- it's considerable as long as I get everything I'm assigned done plus some extra. The reason I stay, though, and the reason I'm at this college for a third of the pay I could have elsewhere, is the sense of making a real difference. I've chosen to teach at one of the least expensive colleges in the country (in the bottom ten, I believe), and we don't have the tuition money or state support to pay market rates, or anywhere close to them. But students can work their way through college in a factory (with no union-level pay; this is the South) or working fast food. They can graduate without debt or with very manageable debt if they need a little more time to study. The majority of our students are the first in their families to go to college.
Negatives are the long hours, the sense that you're never really "off," and the tenure track.
Tenure rant alert:
There's no clear guidance on what it takes to get tenure, and in fact it varies from person to person based on politics and the individual whims of the roughly 15 or so people with veto power over a tenure bid, some of whom the applicant will never meet. If you don't get tenure, you're out of a job immediately, or in some "humane" cases, with one year to look elsewhere (interviews for the following August happen in late fall in this field). The tenure track is a guarantee that you will lose your job in seven years unless things go just right, and you can't know what "right" looks like during those seven years.
If all goes well and you get tenure, then you get to do it all over again every five years until retirement, but a failure during one of those post-tenure reviews does at least mean you'll get one year to put things right before you're fired. Assuming the politics don't change in the intervening year, anyway.
People wonder why I laugh when I see another media rant about the tenure "gravy train."
