Salaries lag at public institutions

ASEE Prism, Oct 2001

When the American Association of University Professors published its annual report on faculty salaries earlier this year, it was sad reading for full professors who teach at public universities. And since 80 percent of Americans are educated at publicly financed schools, that's a very large group of academics who may have been bemoaning their bank balances. On average, the gap between professors at public and private schools is nearly $17,100-that's about $342,000 over a 20-year teaching career. But the range of salaries was from $113,000 to $57,000-a gap of $56,000-and disparities of $25,000 to $30,000 are not uncommon.

The widening ravine between wellendowed private universities and public ones has some experts worried. "It is a real crisis," says F. King Alexander, a professor of educational organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Ronald Ehrenberg, an economist at Cornell University, agrees: "The real issue is whether publics will be able to retain highquality faculty, or if they will be bid away to higher paying privates." And even within public schools, a two-tier system is evolving, Alexander says, as some institutions give priority to two or three departments in an effort to keep up with their private rivals at some levels.

The gap dates to the late '70s, and Ehrenberg says the main problem is that states treat spending for higher education as "discretionary," while funding for elementary and secondary education is usually sacrosanct. "So when states run into financial problems, as they did during the late 1980s and early 1990s, funding for public higher education suffers," he says.

To be sure, money is not the sole criterion academics use to decide where to work. Quality of life can be a big factor: where a school is located, ties to family and friends. And don't forget cost of living. A fat salary in an expensive city may offer less spending power than a modest salary in a smaller town. But in the end, Alexander argues, money counts for a lot. "Salary will matter more and more as the disparity widens," he says.