The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2007, Friday
Copyright 2007 The Chronicle of Higher Education
All Rights Reserved
The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 20, 2007 Friday
SECTION: THE FACULTY; Pg. 10 Vol. 53 No. 33
BYLINE: SIERRA MILLMAN
BODY:
Even as faculty salaries outpaced inflation for the first time in three years, the American Association of University Professors warned of growing financial inequalities within higher education.
"One year cannot reverse discouraging trends that have been developing over decades," writes Saranna R. Thornton, a professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College and author of this year's edition of the annual AAUP report.
Average salaries for full-time faculty members climbed by 3.8 percent compared with the last academic year. A 2.5-percent inflation rate, lower than the last two years, leaves the average post-inflation paycheck up 1.3 percent. It is the first such increase since 2003-4. Associate and assistant professors' salaries saw the largest increases this year, according to the report.
Over all, the average salary for full-time faculty members was $73,207. That varies substantially, of course, with experience and type of institution. Full professors at private doctoral universities make the most, on average: $136,689. At the other end of the spectrum, assistant professors at community colleges earn an average of $48,730. The data come from a survey of more than 1,400 institutions.
Universities and colleges across the nation strive to keep inflation-adjusted salaries from falling, but that means effectively predicting the next year's rate of inflation, Ms. Thornton explains. "It's a huge guessing game," she says.
Institutions increasingly rely on endowment returns to stay competitive in salaries, says the AAUP report. Institutions with larger endowments per number of students -- a group that includes both Harvard University, with an endowment of $28-billion and about 20,000 students, and Grinnell College, with only $1.5-billion but only about 1,500 students -- are ahead of the curve, Ms. Thornton says.
Those institutions are better equipped to draw top faculty members, by offering high salaries and development opportunities, new facilities, and cutting-edge technology. They can also diversify their faculties with greater ease, attracting members of minority groups amid intense competition for them, she says.
Money Matters
The financial well-being of faculty members and the value of students' educations are closely connected, says John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research and public policy. Low-income students may be left doubly disadvantaged -- unable to win admission to universities that can attract top faculty talent with competitive salaries, and unlikely to receive the kind of education at the colleges they do attend that allows them to pull ahead after graduation, he says.
That phenomenon contributes to nationwide economic inequalities even as experts agree that higher education should be helping to even them out, Ms. Thornton says. Because academe is a relatively small enterprise, she says, "it should be easier for us to mobilize ourselves to offset these problems."
Inequalities also exist among professors at the same campuses, the report notes. Although the gaps in salaries between disciplines have narrowed, the AAUP points out that substantial differences endure. Assistant professors in the best-paid disciplines are still paid significantly more on average than those in English departments. For instance, in business departments, assistant professors make 102 percent more. In computer-science departments, they make 60 percent more.
The differences are wider among assistant professors than full professors, the report says, because higher pay is needed to keep younger professors from being hired by corporations.
"It's very hard to maintain a cohesive university dedicated to a common purpose with wide differentials," says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell University and former chairman of the AAUP's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession.
But there is no easy fix: "If these higher-education institutions are trying to be the best they can be in everything that they do, then they have to pay the salaries needed to attract high-quality people," he says.
The same logic seems to govern the hiring of football coaches at institutions in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I-A, who make an average of 9.4 times more than their full-time faculty counterparts, according to the report. While both have reached the top of their professions, there is a perception that football coaches generate more money for the university. That perception, however, may be a myth, says James L. Shulman, co-author with William G. Bowen of the 2001 book, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, which is cited in the report.
"If the direct effects of paying someone like a football coach -- or a president or a vice president of development or an investments manager -- more than a faculty member means that eventually there'll be much more money for faculty, that's a fine argument, but it needs to be supported and, at this point, I don't think it has been," he said in an interview.
Mr. Shulman's and Mr. Bowen's research shows that the correlation between winning athletics and alumni giving is tenuous, and that many Division I-A programs actually lose money. When universities build a "stadium or a locker room or an Astroturf training field, well, they're not investing in educational values," Mr. Shulman says.
Educational values are changing, however, as more institutions struggle financially and as their spending decisions change, says Mr. Curtis, of the AAUP. "The nature of higher education is changing, and yet it's not clear that that is the product of an actual policy decision," he says. "It's something that has been happening incrementally, and we're kind of waving our hands and yelling and saying, look what's happening."
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