Apples to Apples: Using AAUDE Faculty-by-CIP Data to Account for Discipline Differences in Faculty Salaries

Abstract

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.