Academic Year 2013-2014
MIS Salary Survey Results (so far)

Editor: Dennis Galletta
University of Pittsburgh

Scope

Although this survey can and does represent wages from anywhere in the world, this survey makes use of U.S. dollars for comparing and averaging, and forces respondents to do a one-time conversion, freezing the numbers at a point in time. There are advantages and disadvantages from making these simplifying assumptions, but this (over)simplification has been chosen. Philosophically, also, is the fact that in different countries there are different salary models at work. In the U.S. the modal situation is that a faculty salary is high enough to raise a family quite comfortably. In many other countries, there are large numbers of universities that provide extremely low pay, requiring faculty to supplement their pay with substantial amounts of consulting. This survey is not very meaningful for situations in which you need several other engagements to support a family. In many countries there is wide variance on this issue, and some schools pay comfortable wages for university teaching. For those schools this survey can be useful. Thus, the school, not the country, would determine the usefulness of this survey.

Instructions

To enter your data, use the anonymous or non-anonymous form. Also, you might press the refresh or reload button to make sure you have the latest version.

To analyze these data, download the Excel Spreadsheet with Pivot Table, generously provided by Ido Millet of Penn State Erie. The large spreadsheet is useful for slicing and dicing the data to provide meaning to the data. For example, on the chart page, one useful approach for a U.S. research school looking to see average salaries for an assistant professor would be to click on where it says "All" next to the Country tab, and click USA, click on the "All" next to the Teaching/Research tab and select "research," and finally to click "All" next to "Candidate Education" and select "PhD/DBA." Because major salary points are determined by these three factors, you should select your desired combination of these three selections before drawing any conclusions about salaries. Caution: the sample size might become rather small depending on your combination, making the graph exhibit large swings.

Description

These data represent reports by candidates of their academic job offers in Information Systems for the academic year 2012-2013. A new survey will begin each academic year in the fall. Please feel free to browse the last few years' results at:

Results by Academic Year

[2013-2014 (so far)]
[2012-2013 (so far)]
[2011-2012]
[2010-2011] [Insufficient Data for analysis]
[2009-2010] [Analysis]
[2008-2009] [Analysis]
[2007-2008] [Analysis]
[2006-2007] [Analysis]
[2005-2006] [Analysis]
[2004-2005] [Analysis]
[2003-2004] [Analysis]
[2002-2003] [Analysis]
[2001-2002] [Analysis]
[2000-2001] [Analysis]
[1999-2000] [Analysis]
[1998-1999] [Analysis]

Some entries were submitted non-anonymously; please do not contact me to discover the identity of any of the entries.

Please use these data at your own risk; there is no guarantee that respondents were truthful, entered the data without error, or represent an unbiased sample of the population.

See the cautions below on importing the table into a spreadsheet.

Results so far:

# Identity
revealed?
Years
teaching
Educ. Top Tier*
Journal
Pubs
Other
refereed
Journal
Pubs
Textooks
Published
Research Books
Published
Other
Publications
Salary Summer
Support
per year
Years of
Summer
Support
Research
budget
Moving
Support
Course
Load
Tenure Req
Level (Note 12)
Number
of "A"
Pubs
Required
for tenure
Number
of Pubs
Required
for tenure
Position Campus
type
Public
or private
Union? Country Region School's
highest
degree
School's
highest
accredit.
Accepted?
1 yes 3 Phd/DBA 0 4 8 123000 27000 2 5000 5000 3 2 3 8-10 Asst suburban mixed unspecified USA US N.E. Masters National Have accepted
2 5 Phd/DBA 0 11 0 0 8 100000 10000 1 2000 5000 6 2 0 5 switched Asst suburban public USA US S. Masters National Have accepted
3 yes 16 Phd/DBA 4 17 0 0 5 160000 2400 10000 3 2 2 4 associate/tenure urban private USA US W. Masters National Have accepted
* Top tier: Respondents were asked to provide the number of journal publications accepted (both in print and forthcoming) in journals in this list: (MISQ, CACM, ISR, Management Science, JMIS, Decision Sciences, IEEE Transactions, HBR) (these were journals appearing in the top 10 of over half of the scales shown in the Saunders compilation here on ISWorld, listed above in the order in which they appear in the Saunders list. Also, in 2010, we added the Senior Scholars' "Basket" of 6 journals.

Appendix: Data Issues

The following entries were not added to the database for the reasons indicated.
# Identity
revealed?
Years
teaching
Educ. Top Tier*
Journal
Pubs
Other
refereed
Journal
Pubs
Textooks
Published
Research Books
Published
Other
Publications
Salary Summer
Support
per year
Years of
Summer
Support
Research
budget
Moving
Support
Course
Load
Tenure Req
Level (Note 12)
Number
of "A"
Pubs
Required
for tenure
Number
of Pubs
Required
for tenure
Position Campus
type
Public
or private
Union? Country Region School's
highest
degree
School's
highest
accredit.
Accepted?
3 yes 16 Phd/DBA 4 17 0 0 5 190000 2400 10000 3 2 2 4 associate/tenure urban private USA US W. Masters National Have accepted

* Data item above was stated as $190,000 but $30,000 was for being department chair. This item represents #3 in the main table above before adjustment.

Recommendations

For analysis, the best approach is to use Ido Millet's (Penn State Erie) Excel Pivot Table analysis tool, available above. If you choose to copy to your own spreadsheet, beware that some of the entries need to be "cleaned" (such as 2/9 for summer support needs to be translated to a dollar amount). If you still want to capture these data yourself, just click and drag all of the cells, copy to the clipboard, then paste into a spreadsheet package. This works well with Excel 97 and above (with Internet Explorer 4.01 and above); but does not work well with Netscape 4* or when using Lotus1-2-3 version 97 (even when parsing columns). You can then analyze the data by sorting by fields of interest, removing rows, computing averages, etc. One very practical approach for department heads to argue for parity is to focus only on schools with teaching loads similar to yours.

*Note: Thanks are in order for Mary Brabston and Vance Cooney. Mary helped me learn about the incompatibility between Netscape and Excel for the procedure outlined above. Vance Cooney of Xavier offers a remedy: "Since I use Netscape exclusively, I saved it as a text file then opened the saved file in Word and did some global replaces to clean it up for import. Once in a database program like Access or FileMaker Pro its cake to select by rank and/or load etc. to slice and dice the data." Also thanks to Steven Morris for advice on capturing research requirements independent of teaching loads. Finally, thanks to Shu Schiller for suggesting that numeric fields should be aligned right.

Limitations

The object of interest is offers, which most likely repeats a given individual. If this concerns you, sort by the "accepted" field before using the data, then concentrate on "Have accepted" in your analysis; these will be unique individuals.

Notes

  1. The "Identity revealed" field addresses questions of trust in the data; some deans will not use anonymous data as the basis for any salary decisions. Note that the identity is revealed only to me; please do not ask me to violate my pledge of confidentiality.
  2. Salary is Base Salary (exclusive of summer support) in US $
  3. Guaranteed Summer Support is stated in US $, for the period of time shown.
  4. The "research budget" indicates amounts of discretionary spending (including travel, technology, and optional secretarial services, but not including required items such as course software, basic telephone, and copying). If not specified separately, an amount was estimated for maximum travel and technology that would reasonably be supported without special requests (or appeals).
  5. Moving support in US $ also includes any signing bonuses.
  6. Course load is an annual teaching load, stated in semester-course equivalents, defined as number of 3-credit semester courses (roughly 3 hrs/week, 15 weeks) to be taught. Thus, a 3+3 (3 fall + 3 spring = 6-course) load would be entered as 6
  7. "Public or private" indicates whether a school is perceived to be substantially public, substantially private, or mixed.
  8. Unions often have large impacts on salary, and unionized business schools are often well below market (beyond their control).
  9. School attributes such as country and region can also affect salaries.
  10. The school's highest degree granted in business administration is listed.
  11. Accreditation is listed as national, such as AACSB, regional, such as Middle States, and local, such as state or county.
  12. Tenure requirements levels:
    (blank): No tenure system
    Level 0: No publications are required
    Level 1: Publications are required, but outlet quality does not matter
    Level 2: Some outlets are weighted more heavily than others
    Level 3: Outlets are weighted, but non-"A" outlets actually can count negatively