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A survey of faculty salaries by Al-Fanar finds that public university professors in much of the Middle East struggle to climb into the middle class. While of the 12 countries examined, Lebanon and the Gulf countries had the highest public university salaries and Yemen and Morocco the lowest, Al-Fanar found that in every country surveyed “a proportion of the salary scale was below the wage needed to be able to live a middle-class lifestyle when weighted by local purchasing power, specifically what is known as ‘purchasing power parity,’ or how far the professors’ wages could stretch in the local economy.”
“This survey gathered enough data to show what has long been complained about but not necessarily verified -- that professors in the Arab world overall do not make enough, despite their extensive education, to live a middle-class lifestyle, making teaching at a public university an unattractive profession,” Al-Fanar reported. “The findings also illustrate why so many academics migrate to better-paying countries when they can and also why many take on second and third jobs and promote their textbooks, tutoring lessons or consulting businesses.”
