Business School Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey Opens

Today begins another opportunity for AACSB member business schools to gain access to custom data reports on the compensation and demographics of their faculty and staff, with the opening of the 2018-19 Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey (SCDS). Twenty-five total countries and territories were represented in last year’s responses, providing information on over 34,000 business faculty members and more than 6,000 administrators, and we anticipate even greater participation in this year’s iteration.

Formerly known as the Salary Survey, the data on business school faculty salaries is entering its 51st year of trend information, making AACSB’s DataDirect the longest-spanning and most globally comprehensive data source of business school staff salaries in the world. Last year’s name change reflects several improvements to the data collection that are designed to make the information more relevant and informative. The survey combines various faculty and staff data previously covered in multiple surveys in order to have a more comprehensive set of information on business school faculty and staff demographics, and less redundancy in reporting by schools.

In addition, we now track the year of hire, specific tenure status (tenured, tenure-track, neither, or not applicable), and the base salary as a percentage of total compensation for each faculty member reported. Other demographics collected at the person level are primary discipline, pay period (nine to 10 months versus 11 to 12 months), faculty qualification types, and gender. Data are collected anonymously and reported only in aggregate format, though schools have a high degree of flexibility to customize the specific sets of schools reflected in those aggregate figures.

By adding the year hired as one of our person-level demographics, in the future we will be able to track annual cohorts at the school level. Data collected via the SCDS also contain unique information only collected by AACSB, regarding doctoral faculty demand and faculty qualification types (scholarly academic, scholarly practitioners, instructional practitioner, and practicing academic), counted both at the person level and in aggregate for participating and supporting faculty, as defined in AACSB accreditation standards 5 and 15 of the 2013 standards.

Figure 1. Years at Current Business School by Faculty Level

Source: 2017-18 Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey

As in previous years, once this year’s data are released we will share an executive summary highlighting results for all schools whose surveys are submitted by the deadline. In addition, all participating schools gain access to a suite of custom reporting and benchmarking tools in DataDirect to assist with their strategic planning and hiring.

The survey data set also enables a better understanding of the trends in compensation at business schools. When we compare AACSB data against data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for example, we see that the average salary increase for full-time business faculty in the AACSB set of schools was slightly less than the average increase for faculty across all disciplines at the schools in the AAUP data set.

Members with access to complete the SCDS were sent an email message today with instructions for getting started. If you believe you should have received these instructions but did not, please contact us at [email protected]. We look forward to your school’s participation in this year’s collection!