Is a Ph.D. a Vow of Poverty?

Because the institutions represented include a diverse sample, the experiences individual faculty have at individual schools may differ dramatically. In addition to examining the AAUP data, when preparing this year's annual salary report, I examined data on academic labor markets that was collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the College and University Personnel Association for Human Resources and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

I am looking forward to discussing what I have learned from sifting through all this data!

The myth prevails that faculty who teach three, 3-hour classes work a little over 9 hours per week and have summers off. In order to justify compensation that appropriately rewards the work that we do, we need to explain that teaching requires much more time than implied by contact hours. We need to explain the vast amount of administrative work that is done by faculty -- as part of shared governance of the institution (e.g., faculty work on budget-audit committees, admissions committees, athletic oversight committees, etc.). We need to explain that research is at its essence continuing education and thus not something that faculty should do on their own time, for fun, instead of doing the important work of teaching. We need to help legislators, governing boards and the public learn understand that teaching and research are for enormous numbers of faculty complimentary activities.

For the same reasons that Represenative X doesn't want to send his/her son or daughter to a physician who hasn't had any continuing ed. since medical school, the Representative doesn't want to send his/her child to a university where the faculty don't do any research.

We can better justify the need for adequate compensation by better explaining the work we do.

In higher education, when we teach students how to research, write, speak, and think critically, the results of our work will manifest itself over a very long period of time. Accountability and a ssessment is important, but what we do must be measured over more than just a four year period.

Moreover, returning to the physician example, if the doctor gives the patient good advice and the patient ignores it and suffers from lung cancer, heart disease, etc. , the physician still gets compensated for the work he/she has done -- not on whether or not the patient utilized that medical service as to its fullest.

We can measure some of what we do in higher education. But, we cannot let incomplete measurement be an argument for inadequate compensation.

How does the overall increase in faculty salaries compare with blue collar jobs such as electrians, plumbers, and carpenters?

Thanks, Robin

Saranna R. Thornton:
    I just checked out the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site and found the following data for some different occupations between March 2004-05. (The 2006 data isn't out yet.) For workers in private industry I found the following % changes in wages and salaries (doesn't include benefits): Construction = 1.41% Manufacturing = 3.8% The data for specific occupations is there -- but I didn't get to pull it up quickly. The most interesting difference I saw in the BLS data relates to the union status of the job. Unionized workers earned higher hourly salaries/wages and experienced larger increases. Although faculty at most private universities cannot unionize to bargain for salaries, there may be opportunities to bargain collectively in an informal manner -- for example with the help of the AAUP. And of course faculty at public universities (which employ almost 75% of all faculty) can unionize and bargain collectively. This might be a solution to maintaining adequate compensation for faculty.

I think part of the reason why we still see so many applicants for academic jobs -- despite the small increases in faculty pay compared to other professions is the long pipeline.

The National Science Foundation's survey data on Ph.D. recipients shows that time to degree (as measured from college start date -- to Ph.D. completion date) is over ten years. So individuals in the pipeline who have/had their hearts set on becoming college professors may feel they are too far along in their careers to quit graduate school and go instead to law school, business school, or medical school, etc.

But, the students who are in college now can observe the vastly different financial rewards of different professional careers and some of them are going to choose other careers. A paper presented at the American Economic Association conference in January 2006 provided some data that this is already beginning to happen.

Let me return to a medical analogy -- only this time I'll use nursing. Back in the 60's and 70's the nursing profession had a large supply of labor. But, as women began to realize they had many other better paying opportunities, fewer women went to nursing school. A serioius nursing shortage developed in the US beginning in the early 1990s and although there has been some increase in nursing wages, many attempts to solve the shortage problem have been to reduce the time it takes to earn a nursing degree (from 4 years to 2 years), to substitute more LPNs for RNs and to import nurses from foreign countries (e.g., the Phillipenes). Some data exists that suggests the quality of nursing care in the US has declined as a result of the nursing shortage.

Now, higher ed is not dominated by women. But, labor market forces apply in academia as well. So, I think that if the pay gap between professions and the professoriate continues to widen, it's likely we will see a reduction in the number of smart young people seeking to become professors and that in turn will impact the quality of higher ed.

The NSF data, I mentioned show that the median time from start of graduate degree to completion of Ph.D. is just over 7 years. So, I think that increasingly bright college grads are going to figure out they can do better by going to law school (3 years), business school (2 years) or medical school (4 years + residency) -- than by getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor.

In my research I came across a doctorate program in fish and wildlife studies where the university owned boots the doctoral students could use to conduct their field work. Only -- the rules were that while a man could take a boat out any time he wanted, by himself. The women were restricted to only going out if they had a man accompanying them. The university's intent was to protect the safety of the women, but the impact was that women took longer to finish their degrees, and were thus less competitive candidates on the job market.

Now of course the majority of doctoral students are not in fisheries and wildlife management, but this is just an example. Some of the advice on timing pregnancy so as to pose the least disruptions to an academic career suggest that women have their children while in graduate school. Yet, I know of job searches where women who took longer than average to complete their dissertations were not ranked highly as candidates. I also know from my own research that their are incidents where faculty women who had children stopped the tenure clock under their institution's formal stop the tenure clock policy and then this was held against them when they came up for tenure. About ten years ago I surveyed 81 US colleges and universities (random sample) and found that approximately one-third had maternity leave policies that did not comply with federal law.

Bob Drago at Penn State University has an enormous data set showing how childbearing negatively affects women professors (and some men). Finally, economists, Donna Ginther, Deb Barbezat and others have shown that when controlling for discipline, productivity (amount of research), quality of institution where doctorate was received, seniority in the profession, etc. women still are paid less than comparable men.

Unfortunately, while I think the discrimination is lessening, I can't imagine it will disappear in my lifetime.

Although the purpose of tenure was (and still is) to protect academic freedom -- in fact tenure provides a high measure of job security for faculty. Like many benefits (e.g., health insurance, retirement benefits, etc.) economic theory would suggest that college professors would be willing to trade off a certain amount of salary for the benefits of job security.

The problem is that it's hard to quantify the precise effects of tenure on salary because in order to do so, we'd need a large sample of colleges/universities without tenure and another large sample of colleges/universities with tenure and then we'd have to examine, over a long period (e.g., 10 years) how salaries change at the different types of institutions, while controlling for other factors (such as endowment growth, tution growth, etc.). We just don't have a sample for doing the testing necessary to answer your question.

But, even with the job security of tenure (which to me is looking more and more valuable in today's economy), I wonder at what point will professors say that even the benefit of tenure is not worth the salary difference that the professor could be earning with a different type of graduate degree.

Saranna Thornton