Madison Shumway
Life Editor
Last week’s installment of The Bengal’s series analyzing the salaries of ISU administrators and faculty confirmed that field influences pay.
Business professors make more than professors in the health professions, and health professions professors make more than professors in humanities.
The report also found that even within the same field, faculty members make widely different salaries. For example, some clinical associate professors in the College of Health Professions earn upwards of $90 per hour, but instructors teaching in the same college make as little as $20 per hour.
That disparity in compensation can pump up college averages, obscuring the true picture of faculty salary. (That’s why The Bengal used medians in last week’s story and in this one.) Looking at median earnings in a college-by-college comparison, the wages of assistant lecturers or instructors can instead level out the sky-high salaries of top tenured professors.
Using the same example, the average hourly salary for faculty within the College of Health Professions (CoHP) comes to a respectable $44.43. Figure in the lecturers and starting assistant professors, and CoHP faculty members earn a median hourly salary of $33.18.
Titles—and salary—usually reflect faculty’s research and service duties, education and experience. But, as last week’s analysis retrieved disparities between colleges, comparing the salaries of, say, clinical instructors and clinical assistant professors suggests very different teaching experiences.
The salaries analyzed by The Bengal are listed publicly in databases hosted by statewide accountability effort Transparent Idaho and by the university. Therefore, some faculty members, including adjunct instructors, may not be included in this analysis.
Deans
College deans, whose duties involve more decision-making and administration than teaching students, earn a median hourly salary of $78.28. Their assistant and associate deans make a median $55.97 per hour.
Professors
Tenure-track professors can expect to earn more than lecturers and instructors in their departments and to enjoy salary increases as they receive title promotions. Assistant professors make a median hourly salary of $28.82. The next role on the promotion ladder, associate professors, earn $33.26 per hour. Full tenured professors take an eight-dollar pay raise, bringing home $41.40 an hour.
Together, all 294 faculty members with a professor title earn a median hourly salary of $37.48. Some make $20 per hour, and others make more than $70, even $100 per hour.
Clinical Professors
Clinical assistant professors earn a median hourly salary of $31.29, and clinical associate professors earn $41.53. Interestingly, full clinical professors, who outrank clinical associate professors, earn less as a group, making a median $38.51 per hour. All clinical professors’ salaries together combine to a median hourly salary of $33.43. As a group, ISU’s 112 clinical professors represent the widest range of salary of any other faculty title. The lowest-compensated clinical professor earns $21.01 per hour, and the highest-compensated earns $111.13. While college can account for some of this discrepancy, some of the lowest- and highest- compensated clinical professors belong to the same college.
Instructors
Faculty members with the title of “instructor” largely hail from the College of Technology and the College of Health Professions, though some instructors do teach in other colleges. ISU’s 57 instructors earn a median hourly salary of $22.83. The university’s 34 clinical instructors earn a few dollars more at a median $26.36 per hour. Together, the two groups make a median hourly salary of $23.64, with salaries ranging from $16.30 per hour to $36.81 per hour.
Lecturers
At $18.94, ISU’s 78 lecturers receive the lowest median compensation of all other faculty titles. The university’s lowest-compensated lecturer earns $15.05 per hour and the highest-compensated earns $54.47.The lecturer category includes four different titles: assistant lecturer, associate lecturer, lecturer, and senior lecturer. Assistant lecturers make a median hourly salary of $18.60, and associate lecturers make just 30 cents more at $18.90 per hour. Lecturers earn a median $20.34 per hour, and senior lecturers earn $19.21 per hour.
Scope
Even without the nuances of discipline and promotion, the difference between professors, lecturers and instructors is obvious.
Include deans in the picture, and a clear relationship between title and compensation emerges. At median, deans make $78.28 per hour, professors make $37.48, clinical professors make $33.43, instructors make $23.64 and lecturers make $18.94.
That pattern holds true at universities across the United States. Glassdoor lists the average annual salary for full professors at $114,000 (about $55 an hour), compared to the average lecturers’ salary of $52,000 (about $25 an hour).
The Bengal’s university salary series has reaffirmed an interlinked relationship between discipline, title and pay. Another perhaps more complex factor in faculty compensation is gender, which will be analyzed in next week’s issue.
