What Is a ‘Competitive’ Salary?

Many job advertisements assert that the salary offered (and, often, the benefits package) will be “competitive.” While I confess that some of the institutions where I’ve worked use that very language, I remain unimpressed by it.

First of all, it’s hopelessly vague to say a salary is “competitive.” No college or university is going to say in a job ad that its salary is “uncompetitive,” but the term “competitive” is a deeply relative term both from institution to institution and from person to person. For instance, my institution’s salaries are very competitive with those of the other small colleges and universities in Iowa (actually, we’re easily in the top three or four among similar institutions in the state), and our benefits are much better than average in that group as well. But, nationally, our salaries and those of our regional peers are quite low.

However, you can buy a nice house here for well under $100,000, and other aspects of life are commensurately inexpensive (for example, our auto-insurance rates are among the lowest in the country, and some staples, like milk, are half the price they are in a place like Albuquerque). So, while our starting salaries (generally in the mid-$40,000 range) are not exemplary on a national basis, locally one can live quite well on what we pay. When we say our salaries are “competitive,” they certainly are when measured against our cost of living and the salaries of our peer group.

The challenge is that the academic market is national. On a certain level, we’re competing with similar institutions that offer starting salaries that are sometimes 50 percent higher. In reality, of course, the purchasing power of those salaries is probably lower than ours, but those comparisons are not that easy to draw, particularly outside major metropolitan areas. Not everyone wants to buy a house, for example, nor does everyone want to live in a rural area (or a city, for that matter).

Moreover, at an institution like mine, faculty members incur expenses they may not in a more urban location. For instance, it costs real money to get to the nearest airports, both of which are more than a two-hour drive away. Flights out of those airports are more expensive than flights out of hub cities. Not long ago, I moved from one institution about 1,500 miles from where my family lived in Minneapolis to one about half that far. But the more distant university was close to Atlanta, while the nearer one was in a small city, and airfare from Atlanta to Minneapolis-St. Paul was generally much cheaper than it was from my new city.

There is so much that goes into whether a salary is truly “competitive” in the market and for specific candidates that, to my mind, there’s virtually no point in advertising it in that way. If an institution isn’t going to name a number, or at least a range, saying the salary for a position is competitive is no more specific and helpful than saying nothing at all.