Academic Salaries
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on a report produced by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The report contains the result of a survey of academic salaries for the 2007-2008 academic year. The salaries are broken down by rank and discipline.
Those of us in religion and theology can take comfort in Jesus’ words that the last shall be first, because salaries for full and associate professors rank dead last in average salary.1 We fare slightly better for instructors’ salaries and newly hired assistant professors, but we are still almost at the bottom in those categories. Law, business, and engineering are at the top.
Looking at salaries tells us something about what we value as a culture. But I think the more striking thing is that this shows that universities value those disciplines that have more marketing power. If graduates from your field will earn high salaries, then you must be worth more as an instructor. This comes out of the prevalent understanding in America today that says the purpose of higher education is to train you for a profession. Despite what our mission statements say, pay scales show that universities and college are more interested in creating people who are ready for a career than they are in shaping graduates who are able to understand the world with an understanding informed by multiple disciplines and are able (and willing) to make a positive contribution to society.
I think a very interesting study would be a survey of religious colleges to see how their salaries stack up to the standards of non-religious institutions. Religious colleges say they value their faith tradition and think it is important that their students study religion, but do they pay their religion faculty salaries that reflect that? Remember: the market does not set salaries; the administration does. If the administration of a religious college merely pays what the market says a professor is worth, they have abdicated their responsibility to reflect the values of Jesus Christ instead of the values of the culture.
(Hat tip: Charles Halton at Awilum)
- Do you know how bad it feels to get beat out by English majors!?! [back]
On March 12th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I would imaging that there is a strong disparity between religious institution pay (at least those institutions that functionally resemble non-religious institutions–e.g. SMU, TCU, Duke, they are historically religious but operate pretty much independently) and the salaries at non-religious schools with religious school skewing lower. However, this might also be due to the fact that “functionally” religious schools tend not to be major universities or elite colleges.
On March 12th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Even given the disparity in different schools, it would be interesting to know whether the disparity also exists between religious faculty vs. the business faculty (for example) at a religious school.
On March 12th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Kevin,
I like your quotation from Jesus’ word: “The last shall be first.”