{"id":172916,"date":"2012-04-03T18:20:07","date_gmt":"2012-04-03T14:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=172916"},"modified":"2012-04-03T18:21:09","modified_gmt":"2012-04-03T14:21:09","slug":"newly-hired-professors-paid-more-in-armenia-than-china-but-less-than-ethiopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2012\/04\/03\/newly-hired-professors-paid-more-in-armenia-than-china-but-less-than-ethiopia.html","title":{"rendered":"Newly Hired Professors Paid More in Armenia than China But Less than Ethiopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much is a professor worth? It might help to know what professors are actually paid and how that figure compares with other salaries \u2014 and with the salaries of academics in other countries. But as Philip Altbach and his colleagues at the Center for International Higher Education discovered, such questions are a lot easier to ask than to answer, The New York Times reports<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n

In a new book, \u201cPaying the Professoriate,\u201d to be published this month, Altbach and his co-editors examine academic salaries, contracts and benefits in publicly funded universities in 28 countries. They depict a world increasingly divided \u201cinto two categories \u2014 brain drain and brain gain,\u201d as countries with more resources siphon off academic talent from poorer countries. They also show a profession that in many countries is subject to a widening gap between professors at top research universities and those who work at colleges devoted mainly to teaching, \u201cwho are lower in the academic pecking order and who now constitute the large majority of the academic work force.\u201d<\/p>\n

All currencies were converted into US dollars using a purchasing power parity index based on the cost of a set of items in the United States. But they also compared salaries in each country with that country\u2019s average per capita gross domestic product, giving a sense of how academics were paid in comparison to pay for compatriots in other jobs. Finally each of the 28 country teams was asked whether the average academic salary for that country was \u201csufficient to support a middle-class standard of living.\u201d<\/p>\n

In terms of purchasing power, newly hired academics in China ($259 per month, as calculated by this particular study\u2019s index) were the worst off, paid less than colleagues in Armenia ($405) or Ethiopia ($864). Academics in Canada, where the entry level salaries averaged $5,733, and full professors were paid an average of $9,485, had more cause for celebration than in the United States, where newly hired faculty members averaged $4,950 and full professors $7,358 \u2014 a figure that put the United States behind Italy ($9,118), South Africa ($9,330), Saudi Arabia ($8,524), Britain ($8,369), Malaysia ($7,864), Australia ($7,499), and India ($7,433).<\/p>\n

\u201cJust finding the data proved difficult,\u201d Altbach said in an interview. \u201cMany countries track school teachers\u2019 salaries, but not academic pay. And among academics, salary remains such a taboo subject.\u201d A preliminary report in 2003 recruited researchers from a dozen countries but \u201cwe found two problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us were economists, so we didn\u2019t really know how to make sense of the data. And the data we got was pretty bad,\u201d Altbach said.<\/p>\n

However, that first effort caught the interest of Maria Yudkevitch and Gregory Androushchak at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. \u201cLeaving aside social science, the Soviets had a really excellent university system \u2014 which has largely been destroyed,\u201d Altbach said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to get an international perspective,\u201d said Androushchak, one of the book\u2019s co-editors. Although Soviet science had put the first man in space, and Russians continue to be awarded Nobel prizes \u2014 and to launch rockets \u2014 the country\u2019s academic institutions consistently fare poorly in international rankings. \u201cWe wanted to know what developed countries paid their academics, as well as developing countries and the other BRICS,\u201d he said, referring to the emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cPaying the Professoriate\u201d brings together government statistics from countries where the information is available with survey data from those where it is not. Private universities were excluded, since most do not publish salary data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newly hired academics in China ($259 per month, as calculated by this particular study\u2019s index) were the worst off, paid less than colleagues in Armenia ($405) or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":172913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[40118,14652],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}