Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg. Journal of Labor Economics, 2003

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impacts of the growing importance and costs of science on the academic labor market and universities. The decline in the salaries of faculty in public institutions relative to their private sector counterparts is attributed primarily to private institutions' tuition levels rising by more in real terms than public institutions' tuition levels. The growing dispersion in average faculty salaries across institutions within each sector is attributed primarily to the growing disperion of endowmentper student levels across private institutions and the growing dispersion of state appropriations per student across public institutions. Finally, controlling for other factors, those universities whose real research expenditures per faculty from institutional funds are growing the most experience the greatest increase in their student/faculty ratio, other variables held constant.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ea8105b385b94fd0d46641c58a85cb1bad7c90b

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Citations in the corpus

Replacing State Appropriations with Alternative Revenue Sources: The Case of Voluntary Support (2008, background): “Several authors have examined the resulting gap in faculty salaries and the implications for public institutions and their students (Alexander, 2001; Ehrenberg, 2003; Kane & Orszag, 2003; Zoghi, 2003).”
Scientific teams and institutional collaborations: Evidence from U.S. universities, 1981-1999 (2005, background): “Another possible reason for the finding is that better pay, better start-up packages, and better working conditions in top private institutions attract more talented faculty (Ehrenberg, 2003; Ehrenberg et al., 2005).”