Browsing by Author "Goldfine, Leonard S."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Apples to Apples: Using AAUDE Faculty-by-CIP Data to Account for Discipline Differences in Faculty Salaries
    (2011-05-25) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Radcliffe, Peter M.
    Popular methods that attempt to account for discipline in salary studies such as subdividing the population by discipline or market proxies that estimate supply and demand of new Ph.D.s fall short of their intended explanatory power or lead to inappropriate conclusions due to misunderstandings of the nature of academic faculty markets. This study demonstrates how the single variable: average peer institution faculty salary by CIP within rank – obtained from the American Association of Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE) – dramatically improves the predictive power of a salary model, accounting for more than 80% of the variance for assistant professor salaries alone.
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    Correlations Between Average Faculty Salaries and Institutional Rankings for Top-ranked Institutions
    (2007-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Jones-White, Daniel R.
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    Hitting a Moving Target: Navigating the Landscape of Ever-Changing College Rankings
    (2008-05) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Jones-White, Daniel R.; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Lee, Giljae
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    The Politics of Equity Research
    (2010-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Radcliffe, Peter M.
    The neutrality of an IR office can be put to the test when tasked with conducting an equity study. Even the best intentioned and well reasoned study is subject to political considerations that have little to do with the pursuit of truth. From considerations of what variables to include in a regression model to interpretation of results, what it said, how it is said, and from whom a message comes are all as important as any actual statistical results. This session presents a road map to some of the pitfalls an IR office can face when asked to perform an equity study. Resources from the literature as well as anecdotal experience are used to illustrate the often exasperating decisions and negotiations institutional researchers will have to face when moving beyond the realm of pure research and into studies that could have a large and immediate impact on the University and its employees and students lives.
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    Staff Work Satisfaction: An Analysis of the Unexamined Majority in Academia
    (2010-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Cha, Min Young
    Higher education is a labor-intensive industry (Johnsrud, 2002; Levin, 1991). As in any other organization, understanding what satisfies its personnel is essential for improving productivity. However, how staff members perceive, respond, and behave to pay, benefit, and other workplace-related issues has not been studied with as much intensity as for faculty groups. Their jobs in academia are becoming increasingly professionalized: important for supporting academic productivity and managing administrative efficiency. Given the classical duality theory by Herzberg (1959) and existing models for administrative job satisfaction (Volkwein & Zhou, 2003), this paper investigates how seniority and job category explain the satisfaction of staff members, as well as with other factors at a large, public, research-intensive institution. The data used are from a biennial system-wide employment satisfaction survey and analyzed using multiple linear regression. Out of 18,719 invitees for the 2010 survey, Instructional Professionals and Administrators and other Staff represent 79% of the survey population.
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    Victims of Our Success: How OIR Survived the Flood of Ad-Hoc Requests for Faculty/Staff Satisfaction Survey Data
    (2011-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.
    In 2009, the University of Minnesota Office of Institutional research, in partnership with a steering team of select faculty and the Of- fice of Communications launched a massive effort to redesign its biennial HR survey, whose results in past years had been largely ignored by Uni- versity policy makers. In addition to a substantial paring down of the sur- vey instrument, the standard University-, Campus- and College-level re- ports were redesigned to provide more and immediate and actionable in- formation. This sparked a greater demand for more detailed drill- downs. To encourage greater use of this wealth of data, OIR developed an Excel-based ad-hoc report generator to quickly provide results for the seemingly infinite variations on the most commonly asked-for types of reports. To date, since its development less than a year ago, OIR has re- leased over 250 reports to administrators at all levels. This presentation is a demonstration of how a combination of project plan- ning and some clever Excel tools allowed us to quickly and easily prepare customized reports for campus clients. Items that will be discussed in- clude our template/design model, our possibility matrix for determining whether or not a request for drill-down data meets minimum privacy standards, and Excel tools such as pivot tables, lookup tables, and macros that saved OIR from being buried by the fruits of its success.