The Plight of Dr. Daniel McKeown: A Look into UCLA Professor Salaries and the Cost of Living Crisis

The story of Dr. Daniel McKeown, an astrophysicist and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has ignited a debate about fair wages for educators and the growing cost of living crisis, particularly in expensive urban areas like Los Angeles. McKeown's public struggle to afford housing on his $70,000 annual salary has brought to light the financial challenges faced by many university professors, despite working at a prestigious institution.

McKeown's Story: A Personal Account of Financial Strain

In a video that has garnered widespread attention, Dr. Daniel McKeown revealed that he is struggling to make ends meet on his $70,000 salary at UCLA. He stated this was not enough to afford an apartment in the affluent neighborhood surrounding UCLA. According to rental market research firm Zumper.com, the median rent in Westwood is $4,200, 111 percent higher than the national average. "Hi everyone, my name is Daniel, and I’m an astrophysics professor at UCLA. I’m only being paid $70,000 for this academic year to be a full-time professor, and the rent in Los Angeles is incredibly expensive,” McKeown says in the video.

McKeown's situation is not the typical story of an adjunct professor facing struggles. He clarified that he is a full-time lecturer at UCLA. He was forced to move out of his one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. Now he is staying with a friend in San Diego and teaching his classes online. He said he asked for a $100,000 salary but was denied by the university. McKeown, who started working at the California university in September 2023, first went public with his financial and housing problems in September.

McKeown further explained that last year he was not homeless when he was getting paid around $50k and wasn’t struggling financially because his expenses weren’t as high, such as the cost of his rent. When he took a new job with a higher salary of $70k, and his rent increased, he quickly realized that his income wasn’t enough to cover his bills and financial obligations. This awareness came after starting the new job position, leaving him to grapple with the reality that his income wouldn’t meet the rising costs of living.

The Broader Context: Wages, Cost of Living, and Academic Finances

McKeown's struggle highlights several critical issues within the academic landscape and the broader economic environment:

Read also: The Genius of Daniel Kahneman

Insufficient Wages for Educators

McKeown argued that UCLA is "stealing student's tuition money" instead of paying professors a good wage. He stated that "UCLA is paying physics professors $70K. With somebody with a PhD and this level of education, that's unacceptable.” Considering the average salary for a university physics professor is well above $100K a year, as McKeown suggested, he feels taken advantage of by his physics department leadership, especially by his supervisor, who completely disregarded his recent request for a raise.

McKeown isn’t the first UCLA worker to call out the university's insufficient wages and poor worker protection rights. In November 2022, UCLA graduate students orchestrated the largest strike in the history of higher education, with 48,000 participating members demanding better worker protections from the university. While their strike ended with a 50% raise to base pay, many of their other demands - such as free speech rights amidst the pro-Palestine protests and equitable professor wages - have not been met.

The Crushing Cost of Living in Los Angeles

Living in Los Angeles, California, where the cost of living is more than double most of the nation, this physics professor is struggling to pay for rent and basic necessities with his $70K salary, let alone build a life for himself. According to Visual Capitalist, you need to make roughly $114k to live comfortably in California. Other sources seem more accurate, saying roughly $80k - $120k is ideal for an individual living in LA.

University Finances and Priorities

Especially considering UCLA’s 2023 public financial reports, which reveal university grant funding that’s grown exponentially in the past few years - even reaching a historic $1.72B last year - it’s impossible to argue that they’re incapable of paying their professors a living wage. A $70,000 salary would appear to be on the low end for professors at UCLA. According to the university's annual salary scale for professors, pay ranges from $78,200 to $205,400. The monthly pay for a $78,200 would be $6,516.67, making the median rent in Westwood prohibitive. For comparison, this year, UCLA's new football coach DeShaun Foster will earn $3 million.

McKeown is calling for fairer wages in academia, suggesting significant pay cuts for administrators and sports coaches and even proposing a salary cap where no one at the university would earn more than $300,000 per year and no less than $100,000 per year.

Read also: JUCO to NCAA: Cormier's Rise

Ethical Concerns and Grant Money Misallocation

In addition to failing to compensate university professors, McKeown claimed that many universities like UCLA are also struggling to maintain ethical, fair, and equitable physics departments. “A lot of people who get grant money are not even good researchers,” he insisted. “The system for assigning grant money is completely biased, political, and false. That’s why we have great researchers in universities, like me, getting paid an unlivable wage,” he added.

The "Adjunctification" of Academia

McKeown’s situation mirrors the broader issues plaguing academia today and society as a whole, such as adjunct professors who are poorly paid, overworked, and deprived of benefits - represent the growing trend of what is being labeled as “adjunctification.” This refers to universities replacing tenured positions with low-paying, insecure, part-time jobs. Adjunctification is a similar trend that’s part of a wider economic problem seen across many industries where wages haven’t kept pace with rising living costs, where jobs are increasingly being part-timed, outsourced, and automated; people taking on multiple jobs, and “side hustles” and the gig economy are becoming the new norm.

Potential Solutions and Perspectives

Several potential solutions and perspectives have emerged in response to McKeown's situation:

Increasing Professor Salaries

McKeown argued that the physics industry specifically is ‘failing’ - from misappropriation of funds to poor leadership. Not only was his supervisor’s advice to get a second job misguided and disappointing, but it was also representative of much larger failings at UCLA and the educational system at large. How can professors truly show up and support their full-time students if they’re balancing multiple jobs to stay afloat? How can professors struggling to financially support themselves help students craft a successful career in the same industry that’s currently failing them? Outside of providing fair wages for professors, McKeown also argued the physics industry at large is failing to set future students and professors up for success, from crafting new regulatory protections to supporting great research.

Read also: Explore the life of Daniel Amen

Addressing the Cost of Living Crisis

It is important to recognize that the cost of rent has historically risen year over year, and the trend does not appear to stop anytime soon. There’s a big difference between the impact of individual financial literacy - personal responsibility versus fiscal/monetary policy - government’s responsibility. You can guess which one matters more, affects a wide range of the population, and holds more weight.

Re-evaluating University Spending and Priorities

A university’s budget is largely allocated to various staff members, including highly paid administrators, covering benefits like health insurance, child care, and pensions (must be nice). These benefits are seldom guaranteed to part-time workers at big companies, much less freelance adjunct professors.

The Role of Government and Economic Policy

In my view, it reflects a broader systemic issue, the elephants in the room: the widening economic disparity and the higher cost of living. In other words, this illustrates a failure of government. However, massive wealth inequality is a symptom of a broken society and not a disease. Therefore, finding the root cause to reduce this gap is ideal to the extent one can mitigate it knowing that we can never fully have an equally wealth-distributed society since it is incompatible with meritocracy.

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