More on the SALT Faculty Salary Survey

Following up on Saturday's post on the SALT (Society of American Law Teachers) Faculty Salary Survey, I want to talk a little more about differences between salaries at tiers of schools (as measured by U.S. News' law school rankings).  You may recall that Saturday's post discussed the differences between the median salaries of tenured faculty at four tiers of law schools (1-49, 50-99, 101-145, and not ranked).  It showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the median salary at tier 1 schools and the remaning schools.  Let's turn to a similar analysis of the salary of assistant professors by tier.  (Apparently a number of schools have no assistant professors (they start entry-level untenured faculty at the associate level -- or they haven't done entry-level hiring in some years).)

Salary of Assistant Professors by Tier

Tier     N          M                 SD

1           4        113,489            4,912

2          16        102,224           13,927

3          14        100,770            9,313

4          15         92,395            7,919

All      49         99,719           11,785  Median = 99,000

Salary differs by tier: F(3, 45) = 5.05, p < .004

According to the Tukey multiple comparison procedure, only Tier 1 and Tier 4 salaries differ significantly.

Now let's turn to the salaries of pre-tenure associate professors broken down by tier.

Salary of Pre-Tenure Associate Professors by Tier

Tier     N          M                 SD

1           7        126,203            4,820

2          15        111,264           15,655

3          17        109,112            9,914

4          15        107,838           13,013

All      54        111,571           13,265  Median = 111,081

Salary differs by tier: F(3, 50) - 4.02, p = .01

According to the Tukey multiple comparison procedure, Tier 1 salaries differ significantly from those in the other tiers, and salaries in the other tiers do not differ significantly.

These findings are in keeping with the findings for tenured faculty at each tier.  Now this opens a question, what to make of this data?  And are they what you'd expect?  Starting with just a simple observation, it confirms one thing I'd expect -- that the top tier schools have more money than the other schools.

Comments

[Brian Tamanaha]

Alfred,

The data are woefully incomplete, as you know. Nearly all of the schools with the highest faculty salaries did not report. This holds not just for tier 1 schools but also lower ranked schools in NYC, SF, and Chicago. You will see this if you glance at prior SALT surveys. Here are the top full professor salaries in the 2008 survey: Michigan ($254,500), Harvard ($252,450), Minnesota ($220,000) and Emory ($212,000)--far above any salaries reported in the current survey. Going back even further, almost none of the 40 highest paying law schools in 1994-95 (the last time the ABA collected salary data) now report their salaries to the survey. Perhaps the most interesting take away from this year's survey is not the obvious one that top tier (and big city) law schools pay more but that fewer high paying schools are willing to disclose their salaries to SALT (although they have been reluctant all along).

Brian

[Anita Bernstein]

Al, thanks for slogging through the SALT numbers and putting them into context for readers of this blog. I wonder (not to make a claim on your time!): could you collaborate with SALT to generate more transparency? Brian notes that schools would just as soon not share their salary data. Fair enough--nothing in it for them--but disclosure is a public good. Maybe The Faculty Lounge could publish the names of schools that used to disclose back in the ABA-collecting era but now don't?