About This Project
Promoting transparency and understanding in academic labor markets through comprehensive data collection and rigorous analysis.
Project Overview
The Academic Wage Research project is a comprehensive effort to document and analyze faculty compensation across institutions, fields, and time periods. By collecting and standardizing salary data from public records, institutional reports, and other sources, we aim to provide researchers, policymakers, and the public with unprecedented insight into academic labor markets.
Our database spans nearly four decades (1987-2025) and includes over 1.2 million individual salary observations from approximately 180 universities. This makes it one of the most comprehensive academic salary databases publicly available.
The project serves multiple purposes:
- •Transparency: Making salary information accessible to promote fairness and informed decision-making in academic hiring and retention
- •Research: Enabling scholarly research on labor economics, higher education, and wage determination
- •Policy: Informing policy discussions about faculty compensation, equity, and university finances
- •Education: Helping prospective and current faculty members understand academic labor markets and make informed career decisions
Research Team
Dr. First Author
Professor of Economics
University Name
Dr. Author is a professor of economics specializing in labor economics and higher education. Their research focuses on faculty labor markets, academic compensation, and the economics of universities.
Dr. Second Author
Associate Professor of Finance
University Name
Dr. Author is an associate professor of finance with expertise in empirical corporate finance and labor markets. Their work examines compensation structures and incentives in academic and corporate settings.
Why This Matters
Academic labor markets are complex and often opaque. Unlike many industries where salary information is readily available, faculty compensation data has historically been scattered, inconsistent, and difficult to access.
This lack of transparency creates several problems:
Information Asymmetry
Job candidates and current faculty lack information to negotiate effectively, while institutions have full knowledge of market conditions.
Equity Concerns
Without transparency, it's difficult to identify and address pay disparities based on gender, race, or other factors.
Research Gaps
Scholars studying labor markets and higher education lack comprehensive data to test theories and inform policy.
Policy Blindness
Policymakers lack evidence to make informed decisions about university funding, faculty welfare, and educational priorities.
By making comprehensive salary data freely available, we hope to level the playing field, promote fairness, and enable evidence-based decision-making in higher education.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without support from numerous institutions and individuals:
Funding
National Science Foundation (Grant #XXXXX), [University] Research Fund
Data Access
State public records offices, IPEDS/NCES, Elsevier Scopus, numerous university human resources and institutional research offices
Research Assistance
Graduate research assistants from [Universities], undergraduate research fellows
Technical Support
[University] Research Computing, Open source community
Contact Us
We welcome questions, comments, and collaboration opportunities. Please reach out to us: