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Latest AAUP Report on Average Faculty Salaries

Brian Leiter

IHE has an overview; unsurprisingly, the news is not good, and the private-public gap continues to grow.  Note the strong average salaries among public universities offered by Rutgers, which has a unionized faculty.  Among the private universities, the high average salaries at Princeton are especially notable, given the absence of law, business, and medical schools there, unlike most other schools on that list.

UPDATE:   Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis) calls to my attention this (subscription-only) CHE piece on the new AAUP data which notes:

Tight finances on many campuses have led to another year in which average salaries barely increased, exacerbating in­equities facing seasoned faculty members, whose salaries are stagnating while their newly hired peers are compensated at competitive market rates.

That anomaly in pay, called salary compression, means that the paychecks of experienced faculty are only slightly bigger than those of new professors. Some fields, including economics and philosophy, are experiencing salary inversion, in which new assistant professors earned more than the average for assistant professors in 2009-10, according to data from the American Association of University Professors. In business administration and management, the salaries of new assistant professors have raised the pay for that rank so much that the average assistant professor earned more than the average higher-ranked associate professor last year.

Any thoughts on what explains this?

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5 responses to “Latest AAUP Report on Average Faculty Salaries”

  1. Alan Nelson

    Market forces fully explain this at most institutions. Administrators use discretionary funds to approve competitive salaries for new hires and retentions. Of course, "retention" means "responding to an outside offer." Even at state institutions with set salary scales, there are ways to bump initial salaries to make them competitive.

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  2. Fritz Warfield

    I'd like to hear Alan Nelson or anyone else provide a fuller explanation of the market forces that explain compression involving new hires who have exactly one offer. What is the market force that commands an externally competitive salary in such a case?

    And though administrators of course do use discretionary funds in retention efforts in Nelson's specified sense, such funds are also used at a good number of places in broader (pre-emptive) retention efforts in cases that do not involve outside offers.

    BL COMMENT: Fritz asks an important question, but here's what I think happens–and it is not a testimony to the rationality of the market. Departments hiring rookies try to figure out what the "going rate" is for rookies at what they view as peer departments. At least some number of those peer departments are actually making offers to rookies with competing offers. Those departments thus 'up' the ante, and then all the other departments who think of themselves as keeping pace with those schools up their initial offers as well. Because tenured faculty are not in the same kind of market, they do not benefit from this irrational 'word of mouth' about what you need to pay for more talent.

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  3. Skef

    This is not from personal experience, but I believe it is fairly accepted that the post-tenure market is much less fluid than the tenure-track market, so tenure is one form of "golden handcuffs". If a school doesn't pay market rate (or perceived market rate) for a tenure-track hire, even one with a single offer, that hire is presumably more likely to go back on the market in subsequent pre-tenure years, looking for a better offer. If that's less likely for a tenured employee, then the compression has a rational basis.

    One could always counter-offer at that point, of course, but if the hire was feeling unappreciated to begin with, they will have bad feelings, might have avoided putting down roots, etc.

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  4. Hans Halvorson

    Regarding Brian's comment about Princeton University: I don't think that the AAUP survey includes faculty in medical schools.

    BL COMMENT: That may be right, I'm not sure. It definitely includes faculty in law and business schools, and since it reports "average" salaries, this has a significant effect on the results for schools that have them.

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  5. Michael Kremer

    Hans Halvorson is right. "The salaries are reported in thousands of dollars and are rounded to the nearest hundred. They are adjusted to a nine-month work year. The figures cover full-time members of each institution's instructional staff, except those in medical schools." http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/

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