Individuals who are interested in careers in teaching in a university setting generally have to earn tenure in order to be guaranteed job security. A number of institutions maintain strict guidelines of requirements for achieving tenure, including how long someone has worked there, how much work they've had published and their teaching success rate.

Ohio State University (OSU), the largest university in the country, is reconsidering how they reward tenure to their faculty, according to USA Today. OSU's president Gordon Gee, who was also revealed to attain the highest salary by a college president, is suggesting that the rewarding of published journal articles as a way to assess teacher performance is an outdated rule.

"Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer," he told The Associated Press. "In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it takes approximately 7 years of teaching and research to obtain tenure.