How much does your professor make?: Faculty compensation by college

This figure visualizes the range in faculty salary for each ISU college. Each college’s lowest, highest and median salary are expressed numerically. The colored boxes represent the majority of faculty within each college (the 25th to 75th percentile). The whiskers or lines extending from the boxes represent the lowest- and highest-paid faculty within each college (the bottom and top 25 percent). Dots represent outliers, or faculty members paid much greater than the median salary.

Madison Shumway

Life Editor

Last week, The Bengal analyzed the salaries of ISU’s 80 highest-paid employees. In this week’s issue, we break down faculty salary by college.

For students after graduation and their instructors at ISU, discipline determines take-home pay.

According to statewide documents published by Transparent Idaho, an accountability effort maintained by Idaho’s state controller, and the university’s own budget documents, College of Pharmacy faculty are ISU’s highest paid on average, College of Technology (CoT) faculty are lowest and certain Health Professions faculty members take home the university’s largest faculty salaries.

In this report, faculty includes lecturers, professors and instructors, both tenured and untenured, whose salary and position information was publicly available. Deans, associate deans and other administrators are excluded from analysis.

College of Technology

At $27.18, College of Technology faculty represent ISU’s lowest median hourly salary for a college. CoT’s lowest-compensated faculty member earns $12.24 an hour, and its highest-compensated earns $72.12. However, the majority of CoT’s 82 faculty members makes between $22.48 and $31.93 per hour.

College of Arts & Letters

College of Arts & Letters (CAL) faculty make up the second tier of salaries. At 162 faculty members, CAL is ISU’s largest college. Its hourly compensation ranges from $16.20 to $60.94, and faculty earn a median salary of $27.67. The majority of CAL faculty earns between $20.73 and $31.93 per hour.

College of Education

The College of Education (CoE) pays its 39 faculty members between $17.31 and $41.59 an hour, with the majority earning between $23.93 and $35.60. Median hourly salary at CoE is $28.02.

College of Nursing

College of Nursing’s 21 faculty members earn a low of $24.65 and a high of $55.46. The college’s median salary falls at $30.77, and most nursing faculty members make between $27.30 and $36.42.

College of Health Professions

With a low of $20.40 and a high of $111.13, the 74 faculty members in the College of Health Professions represent the widest salary range of all ISU colleges. The majority of faculty earn between $25.96 and $50.65, with several notable outliers making more than $90 per hour. The college’s median salary is $33.18.

College of Rehabilitation and Communication Sciences

Faculty in the College of Rehabilitation and Communication Sciences earn a median hourly salary of $33.64, most making between $29.59 and $38.38 per hour. Its lowest-paid faculty member earns an hourly wage of $17.94, and its highest-paid receives $52.51. The college employs 44 faculty members.

College of Science and Engineering

The College of Science and Engineering (CoSE), ISU’s second-largest college at 131 faculty members, pays a median hourly salary of $38.04. Its lowest and highest-paid faculty members earn $15.05 and $71.78, respectively, but the majority of CoSE faculty makes between $28.85 and $46.08 per hour.

College of Business

A smaller yet highly-paid college at 39 faculty members and a median salary of $51.68, the College of Business (CoB) employs a wide range of faculty. Its lowest-earning makes $20.02, and its highest-earning makes $78.37. Most CoB faculty earn between $40.99 and $61.59 per hour.

College of Pharmacy

The College of Pharmacy provides its faculty with ISU’s highest college median salary of $54.15. The majority of the college’s 36 faculty members make between $50.02 and $64.78 per hour, with its lowest earner at $37.53 and its highest at $78.85.

The above figures may prove unsurprising for those acquainted with faculty compensation at public universities. ISU’s colleges roughly adhere to national benchmarks for faculty pay, with the majority of STEM faculty out-earning the majority of humanities faculty.

For example, a 2016 analysis of faculty salary by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources pinned average hourly compensation for English faculty at $31.36. Biology faculty earned $36.21 per hour, health professions faculty $39.06 per hour and engineering faculty $50.26 per hour.

Discipline isn’t the only factor influencing faculty salary, however. Future issues of The Bengal will address faculty title, gender and salary.