By Elliot Davis
Finance is often anecdotally cited as being one of the more lucrative disciplines for business school professors. But, how much are finance professors earning, really? And, is it significantly more than their colleagues in the other business disciplines? The 2013-2014 Salary Survey data is now available, and questions such as these (and many more) can be answered by reviewing the Salary Survey Overview Report which is now available to participating members for download in DataDirect.
The following data looks at only faculty members of the highest rank at their institution, so associate professors, adjunct faculty, or any other non full-time faculty types are not included in this data set. The chart below highlights that finance professors do earn more, on average, than those in other disciplines, 13.7 percent more in fact.
Source: AACSB 2013-2014 Salary Survey.
But, the averages don’t tell the whole story. What is the total distribution, from the minimum to the maximum salary, across disciplines? We can get that data, too.
You will see in the below chart that not only do finance professors earn the most, on average, they also have the greatest discrepancy from the lowest to the highest paid. The lowest salary reported across any discipline is in finance at 29,000 USD, as well as the highest salary reported at a whopping 589,000 USD.
Source: AACSB 2013-2014 Salary Survey.
To break things down further, we find that the mean salary for professors across all disciplines is 151,000 USD. The median salary for a finance professor clocks in at 152,000 USD.
While all of this data certainly does tell us that finance professors are being paid the highest salaries on average in comparison to their peers, this isn’t true when excluding the numbers from the United States. Among the non-U.S. schools reporting, the discipline with the highest mean salary was actually Operations Management at 155,000 USD, narrowly surpassing finance which averaged 151,000 USD.
While the economic downturn certainly rocked the world’s financial landscape, professors of finance are certainly unlikely to be complaining. Does any of this data surprise you? Share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to check out the complete dataset for more.
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