1997-1998 Preliminary Taulbee Data on Faculty Salaries

By Dexter Kozen
and Jim Morris

Each September, the Computing Research Association surveys academic departments in the United States and Canada that offer the Ph.D. in computer science or computer engineering. The annual CRA Taulbee Survey collects data on enrollment in the undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. computing programs, about employment of Ph.D. graduates of these programs, and on the number and salaries of faculty in these programs.

This is the 28th year that CRA has tracked the production and employment of Ph.D.s in the computer science field. For the past 12 years, computer engineering data have also been incorporated into the survey. The traditionally high response rate to the survey makes the data especially useful; the data are used widely, not only by CRA's members but also by other organizations and institutions.

Each January, as a service to our members, CRA publishes a preliminary report of the survey's salary data. We believe these preliminary results comprise enough data to be valuable and valid as tools for planning and evaluation. The full survey, including updated salary data, enrollment, production, and employment data, and trend analyses, will appear in the March 1999 issue of CRN.

The following tables show the results in a format comparable to that used in previous CRA surveys. In the tables that group the departments by rank, the groupings are based on the 1993 National Research Council ranking of research-doctorate programs in the United States, released in 1995.

Faculty Salary Tables

Each department is asked to report the minimum, mean, and maximum salary for each professorial rank and the number of persons at each rank. The salaries are those effective as of January 1, 1999. For U.S. departments, nine-month salaries are reported in U.S. dollars. For Canadian departments, twelve-month salaries are reported in Canadian dollars.

The column labeled "#Faculty" is the sum of the number of faculty in each rank for those departments that reported salary data in that rank. The minimum and maximum of the reported salary minima (and maxima) should be self-explanatory. Thus, the range of salaries in a given rank among departments that reported data for that rank is the interval ["minimum of the minima," "maximum of the maxima"]. The means of the reported salary minima (maxima) in a given rank are computed by summing the departmental reported minimum (maximum) and dividing by the number of departments reporting data at that rank. The average salary at each rank is computed by summing the individual means reported at each rank and dividing by the number of departments reporting at that rank.

For comparison with last year's data, Table 10 shows the overall (unweighted) average salaries for the U.S. departments and separately for the Canadian departments. The preliminary data from 1997 are those published in the January 1998 CRN, and the final data from 1997 are those published in the March 1998 CRN. As can be seen, the U.S. averages appear to have increased about 4% in both the Assistant Professor and Full Professor categories from last year. Averages at the Associate professor level increased by around 1%. Canadian averages appear to have changed at a similar rate, however the Full Professor category average seems to have slightly decreased. This category is however based on a smaller number of departments and is therefore more strongly influenced by a single department's values. *The reader should note that there was an error in the preliminary reporting of the number of Canadian departments responding — the actual number was 10. However, the salary data was correct. The response rate was corrected in the final statistics in the March 1998 CRN reporting. The reader should also note that the 'Other' category for preliminary data on new Ph.D.s has not been included. This should be corrected in the final statistics in the March 1998 CRN reporting. On behalf of CRA, we thank all of the participating departments for their efforts to meet the deadline.