Teach and research at a university. The pay is good, the training is long, and permanent jobs are scarce.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Associate professor
$122,000
New assistant professor
$63,000
Full professor
$192,000
Job Bank's national median is $58.89 an hour, about $122,000 a year full time. That covers people already hired into a professor job. Sessional instructors, who are paid course by course on short contracts, earn far less and are not in this range.
$63,000 to $95,000
Assistant professor, first contract
Most universities pay on a union grid with a raise every year. Medicine, business, law and engineering pay above the grid. Arts and humanities sit at the bottom, and small universities pay less than big research ones.
About $190,000
Full professor at a large research university
Job Bank's top tenth is about $92 an hour, roughly $192,000 a year. Deans and medical school professors earn more. Ontario publishes the name and pay of every public employee who earns over $100,000 a year, so professor salaries there are public.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a three year bachelor's degree at a cheaper university, a one year master's, and a fully funded doctorate where tuition is covered and you are paid a stipend of roughly 20,000 to 40,000 a year. The high end is a four year degree, a two year master's at 14,000 a year, and a doctorate where funding is partial and you carry some tuition yourself. If a doctoral program will not fund you, treat that as a warning sign rather than a bill to plan for. The real cost here is time: nine to fourteen years at student or stipend income, and no guarantee of a permanent academic job at the end.
If a doctoral program will not fund you, treat that as a warning sign. Paying full tuition for a doctorate is how people end up with big debt and no job.
Tenure
After about 6 years of review you can only be let go for cause or if the whole program closes. Almost no other job has this.
Sabbatical
A paid research leave, often 6 to 12 months every 6 or 7 years.
Pension and full health coverage
Most Canadian universities run strong pension plans.
You choose what you study
Inside your field, nobody assigns you a topic.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
The longest training path on this site. Roughly 10 to 14 years after high school.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Strong grades and a subject you could read about for fun. Nothing else is required yet.
Bachelor's degree
3 to 4 years
Grades matter here. So does getting into a professor's lab or research project as an undergraduate.
Master's degree
1 to 2 years
Some fields let strong students go straight to a doctorate instead.
Doctorate
4 to 6 years
Original research, a long dissertation, and teaching as a TA (teaching assistant). You are paid a modest stipend while you do it.
Postdoc, then the job market
0 to 4 years
Short research contracts while you apply. Hundreds of applicants for one posting is normal, and you go where the job is.
The subject you love
You will spend a decade on it. Pick honestly.
English
Writing is most of the job: papers, grant applications, lectures.
Math and statistics
Needed in far more fields than people expect, including psychology, biology and economics.
A second language
Required in some history, literature and area studies fields.
No licence exists. Anyone a university hires can teach there. What gates the job is the doctorate and the hiring committee. Titles run assistant professor, then associate professor, then full professor, and each promotion is judged on research, teaching and service. Almost every Canadian university has a faculty union that sets the pay grid.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Published papers
Peer-reviewed articles in respected journals. This is the main currency.
Grant money
Bringing in research funding makes you cheaper for a department to hire.
Teaching experience
Courses you ran on your own, not just marking for someone else.
A field the department needs
Luck matters. Postings are written around a gap in one specific department.
Most people with a doctorate do not become professors. Plan for that from the start.
Government research and policy
Federal and provincial labs, agencies and departments.
Industry research
Drug companies, tech firms and energy companies hire doctorates directly.
Data science and analytics
Quantitative fields move over easily, often for more money.
College teaching
More teaching, less research, and usually a faster route to a permanent job.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Six to nine hours in front of a class, plus office hours and marking. The rest goes to research: reading, running experiments or digging through archives, writing papers, applying for grants. Add supervising graduate students, department meetings, and reviewing other people's work. Summers are not time off, they are when the research gets done.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The point is not comfort. It is that a professor can publish findings a government, a donor or the university president dislikes without losing the job. That is why it survives.
Universities Canada puts enrolment at roughly 1.5 million students and the sector's economic impact at about $48 billion a year.
The federal doctoral research scholarship pays $40,000 a year for 3 years. Plenty of new graduates in other fields start below that.
A large share of undergraduate courses in Canada are taught by sessional instructors hired one course at a time, with no office, no security and a fraction of a professor's pay. Faculty unions have argued about this for decades.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.