So what, if anything, can we conclude from all this salary data we’ve been looking at over the past three days?
There are really three issues at play. The first has to do with average salaries – does it make sense that, on average, our professors are essentially the best paid in the world? Well, there’s no reason to begrudge paying top dollar for top talent. If Canadian professors were – collectively – considered to be the best in the world, this would make sense. The problem is that nobody’s sure if this is the case. Are they good? Sure. The best? That’s not so clear.
The second is the salary structure of the profession as a whole. The progression in pay from assistant professor to full professor is much less steep in Canada than in the U.S .or the U.K. It’s not clear why this is so. One possible suspect is unionization. Another is that the rank of full professor is handed out more freely here than elsewhere (36% of professors are considered “full” in Canada, compared to 27% in the U.S. and 12% in the U.K.), and top salaries cannot rise as high when so many people are eligible for them. Whatever the cause, the consequences are serious: despite having enormous resources devoted to compensation, Canadian universities are genuinely at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the very top professors. At the moment, the only way to compete for top talent would be to give massive pay rises across the board, and that simply isn’t on.
The third is the issue of “what have you done for us lately.” Much of the rise in academic salaries is the result of recent increases in provincial funding. For obvious reasons, when governments handed that money over to institutions no one said: “let’s use this cash to make Canadian academics the most highly-paid in the world!” Rather, universities said things like “we’ll use this money to hire the best professors in the world!” However, not only do we have no idea if actually they did this – have we been hiring proportionately more foreign professors lately, or are we fishing in the same old pool? – but much of the money inevitably ended up with incumbent employees who got paid more for doing exactly what they were doing before.
Whether or not you think academics “deserve” their current levels of pay, the fact is that some recent increases can look a lot like unearned windfall gains. Now that governments are cutting funding, it’s reasonable to expect people to point that out more frequently. It could get ugly.
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Re academic salaries, i’m outside of the full time academic union, so not to take this as a defensive comment. Statistically, we’d need to control for no. years of teaching and qualifications. As well as include some measure of variability, I gasp when all I see are mean salaries, with means being sensitive to high/low end values. Alex may have touched on this these but really they are show stoppers for me in such an analysis.
The thesis seems to our professors are higher paid than their intl counterparts, but we don’t have apples to apples data, cultures or tuitions.
Those are fair points, Tony. Though at the national level, it’s hard (for me, anyway) to see how the age pyramid of the professoriate would differ significantly from one country to another.
Re: tuition (or resources generally) – yes, absolutely! But do salary demands drive tuition, or the other way around?
Two points. On job related discussion boards I look at occasionally, the salary differences between Canada and the US come up at times, and the discussion quickly turns to factoring in tax treatment and cost of living, the usual consensus being that these offset a good bit of any advantage Canada might have. Not at all sure how true this is, but it should be a consideration.
Secondly, it seems to me a good bit of the exchange rate adjusted higher Canadian salary is just that – a reflection of a significantly appreciated Canadian dollar. I think that raises a couple of issues, including where the Canadian dollar is going to settle longer run and the issue of who should bear the risk of significant fluctuations and how are salaries adjusted. If we ratchet back salaries when the dollar is high, do we get bumped up if it sinks? And since our expenditures (mortgage, bills etc) and those of our institutions are in Canadian dollars and not correlated to fluctuations in the exchange rate, how do we cope with that? I can see the point of moving to a more comparable level of pay, but it should be to long term expected values.
Hi Jim. Thanks for reading our stuff.
Two excellent points, I think.