By Peter Schmidt

Vancouver, British Columbia

Among faculty members at business schools in the United States, the rich tend to be getting richer while others fall farther behind, according to a paper being presented here Thursday at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

In recent years, business schools that were already in the top fifth in terms of what they pay tenured and tenure-track faculty members have been giving professors substantially larger pay raises than those being offered by competing institutions, the paper says. The wealth is not being shared equally, however. The faculties of the highest-paying institutions are themselves becoming more stratified in terms of earnings, with professors at the top of the heap enjoying much faster proportional growth in their salaries than those on the bottom.

The authors of the paper are John J. Cheslock, an associate professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park and senior research associate at its Center for the Study of Higher Education, and Trina Callie, assistant dean of the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management.

They based their analysis on salary data from nearly every business school in the nation collected as part of an annual survey by AACSB International-the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. They restricted their analysis to the academic years from 1997-98 to 2004-5, and to full-time faculty members with the rank of assistant, associate, or full professor at research/doctoral or master's universities with at least 10 such faculty members on the business school's payroll.

Contributing to the pay gaps between business-school faculty members was a marked difference in how the institutions approached disparities in what their professors earned, the paper says. In contrast to the most generous business schools, those that had been paying their faculty members the least tended to compress wages, giving their highest-paid professors smaller raises than those who earned less. As a result, the highest-paid faculty members at low-paying business schools lost even more ground to their best-compensated counterparts at business schools where salaries were the most generous.

The paper also describes a widening in the pay gap between faculty members at private and public business schools. Full professors, for example, earned an average annual salary of about $107,900 at private schools and $95,300 at public schools in 1997-98. By 2004-5, those figures had risen to $120,900 and $105,400, respectively, meaning that the private-public pay gap in average salaries at their rank grew by about $3,000, or 24 percent, to just over $15,500. The study found an interesting wrinkle in the trend, however, in that the lowest-paying private business schools actually paid their professors less, on average, than the lowest-paying public ones.

Among the factors the paper's authors cite as likely to have driven the trends they chart was a decline in the number of business Ph.D.'s granted annually. That decline, they say, has contributed to a shortage of business-school faculty members that has caused entry-level salaries to increase and prompted institutions to raid one another for established professors.