We study long-term trends in the compensation of faculty and its drivers in the U.S. and Canada using a panel dataset covering most research institutions. We document three stylized facts across academic disciplines. First, the dispersion of faculty pay has widened significantly over the past 50 years, with economics, business, and especially finance exhibiting a large and growing premium. Second, faculty wages correlate strongly with their student returns to college education, both in levels and in the time-series. Third, high paying fields display higher students per faculty ratios and a lower supply of PhD students relative to faculty. Using granular data on students' future earnings at the university-field level, we estimate the elasticity of faculty pay to returns to college education to be in the [0.4-0.7] range. However, this elasticity varies significantly across disciplines: it is higher in fields with larger student-to-faculty ratios and lower PhD supply. This heterogeneity in elasticity explains, for example, the sizable wage premium of finance over computer science faculty, despite similar student future earnings in both fields. Our findings suggest that faculty wages are increasingly shaped by inter-university competition within fields, driven by student demand responding to varying returns to university education across disciplines. In contrast, industry outside options for faculty appears to play a limited role.