Penn professors are among the highest paid in the country, according to a new report.
A report on faculty salaries, which was released last month by Penn's Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty, compared the salaries of Penn faculty members with those of faculty at other institutions and within departments at the University.
According to data from the American Association of University Professors that was first published last year, the mean academic base salary for full professors at Penn was reported to be $120,300.
Only four peer institutions -- Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities and the University of Chicago -- were reported to exceed Penn by more than two percent in their mean salaries.
"The good news is that by and large, Penn faculty salaries are very competitive with the best paid in the world," said Education Professor Erling Boe, who has chaired the committee on salaries for the last four years.
The AAUP survey ranked Penn among a group of 17 major universities that have comparable Ph.D. programs, professional schools and academic reputations.
Additionally, over the past 15 years, the mean salaries of full professors at Penn were shown to have gradually become more competitive on a national level.
In the 1986-87 academic year, the average salary of a Penn faculty member ranked ninth among its peer institutions at $59,600. It has risen by more than $60,000 over the past 14 years, and now ranks fifth.
The report also released statistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology annual survey, which collects salary data from nearly two dozen private and public research universities.
In comparing the mean salary of faculty in five different academic fields -- the natural sciences, humanities, engineering, architecture and management -- the MIT survey showed that the mean salaries for full professors in the natural sciences and engineering at Penn have declined in competitiveness in recent years.
While the mean salary level for full professors in the natural sciences ranked twelfth out of the 24 universities in the MIT sample, the institutions that ranked above Penn have average salaries that are noticeably higher.
Similarly, the mean salary level of full professors in the Engineering School ranked eleventh out of 21 universities in the MIT report. However, all but three of the higher-ranking schools reported significantly larger mean salaries.
"What everyone would like is to have all schools and departments within schools be highly competitive," Boe said. "Not everything is the same -- some schools and departments are more competitive than others."
The mean salaries for associate professors in the natural sciences and assistant professor salaries in the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Engineering School have also fallen out of competitive range.
The report listed a series of recommendations that would help remedy the salary levels that were shown to have fallen behind those of peer institutions.
Among the solutions listed were placing a priority on regaining Penn's competitive level in the departments where current salaries have waned and rewarding the distinguished performance of faculty members who have not used attractive offers of external appointment to negotiate salary increases.
"The deans in [the School of Arts and Sciences] and [the Engineering School] are aware of the problem, and they are trying to bring those salaries in line with others in the MIT survey," Associate Provost Barbara Lowery said.
Lowery emphasized the importance of addressing this issue within the individual departments at Penn.
"The deans recognize that they need very competitive salaries to attract and retain the best faculty," Lowery said. "If they fall behind, the quality of the faculty will suffer."
The report was compiled using detailed salary data for Fiscal Year 2001 received from several schools at Penn, as well as data from the central administration. It also took into account various national reports on faculty salary levels at peer institutions to examine trends of salary competitiveness.
