Accounting for Demographic and Salary Changes among Business School Faculty

Abstract

This article examines patterns of change among Business and non-Business PhD cohorts in the United States as well as comparisons across Business subfields. By drawing upon responses to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, we track changes in the backgrounds of doctoral graduates and find a trend over the past 20 years towards more gender, ethnic, and citizenship diversity. We also find that PhD cohorts in Business opt for Industry employment at approximately the same rate as non-Business PhD cohorts while very few pursue “postdoc” employment. We show substantial differences whereby Business salaries tend to be diverging towards nearly twice the income paid to non-Business doctoral graduates and – among the Business subfields – we find a wide range with Accounting earning the highest wages and Human Resources being paid the lowest. Our findings suggest that Business School faculty are not paid relatively high wages due to private-sector competition as is conventionally assumed; instead, it seems plausible that the salary differential exists partly to compensate for the typically higher wages earned by the non-PhD graduates that business schools train. Alternate explanations include the possibility that there current Business School faculty salaries are the unsustainable result of runaway competition among schools. Greater awareness and exploration of the types of patterns that we report offers important baselines for (prospective) PhD students and their advisors. NOTE: The use of NSF data does not imply NSF endorsement of the research, research methods, or conclusions contained in this report.