George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has an interesting post advocating merit-based pay cuts for academics:
Many universities now have pay freezes or even nominal pay cuts. Under the circumstances, several professors have told me that there’s little point in doing faculty evaluations. If there’s zero – or negative – money for raises, why bother saying who’s doing well and who’s not?
It amazes me how much these remarks take for granted. Suppose a department is 5% over-budget. It may be obvious that it needs to cut total compensation by 5%, but it isn’t obvious that any particular professor’s salary needs to be cut by 5%. If raises can depend on performance, so can cuts! If a chairman normally gives a 0% raise to his worst performer, and a 5% raise to his best performer, why not respond to fiscal austerity by simply changing the range from -7.5% to -.2.5%?
I agree with Bryan’s argument, though I suspect many of my fellow academics won’t. One possible objection is that the criteria for evaluating “merit” in academia are too subjective. But academic departments already have merit criteria for making hiring and promotion decisions. If our criteria are good enough to decide whether or not someone deserves to be hired or offered lifelong employment, they should be good enough to make much less consequential judgments on whether a given scholar should get a 3% pay cut as opposed to 1%. A department that lacks good criteria for evaluating merit ought to get some pronto – whether it intends to base pay cuts on them or not.
The real reason why Bryan’s proposal is unlikely to be implemented is academic politics. Any law school dean or department chair who tried it would face enormous resentment from faculty members whose scholarship was judged deficient (or just not as good as that of their peers). To be sure, he or she might also win some gratitude from superior performers. But, as a general rule, people resent pay cuts more than they are grateful for increases. Obviously, people also don’t like equal across-the-board cuts. But administrators can blame those on budget cuts or economic conditions. By contrast, if the administrator saddles professor X with a 5% pay cut while Professor Y gets off with only 2% because her work is better, X is likely to blame the administrator.
In private industry, owners might nonetheless institute merit-based pay cuts because they stand to profit directly from rewarding good performers and penalizing bad ones. Such incentives are weak or nonexistent in the case of academic administrators. If you want to be a successful academic administrator, the first rule you have to follow is to not antagonize the faculty. For that reason, Bryan’s merit pay cut proposal is unlikely to be implemented at very many schools.
UPDATE: I am sure clever commenters will suggest that Bryan and I are among those academics who deserve a merit-based pay cut. All I can say in response is that if a merit-based pay cut system were adopted, I would be more than willing to have my work judged by the same standards as those applied to my colleagues.
frankcross says:
The logic of this seems obvious. I think the generally accepted reason why wages are sticky, and employers in general don’t like to give pay cuts is morale. That the effect would be to make poor performers even worse (especially bad with tenure). But in today’s world, with no pay increases, morale might be hurt for top performers, so I think it makes sense.
October 14, 2009, 9:26 pmJudge Not Reinhold says:
And what are the chances that the pay of the queer theorist or the critical race studies “scholar” will be cut?
October 14, 2009, 9:38 pmCurt Fischer says:
How much did the bonus-based compensation popular at investment banks and other financial firms arise out of the need to “hide” pay decreases? As frankcross says, wages are sticky, and no one likes a pay cut. Maybe academics should go to a bonus based model where 3-5% of your gross pay comes in a year-end bonus determined by peer or administrator evaluations.
October 14, 2009, 9:41 pmPJens says:
There seems to be an assumption that all pay rates of employees are common knowledge to every one else inside the institution. Why does this have to be? Also, isn’t the heart of this issue performance based pay?
October 14, 2009, 10:36 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Just measure merit by class enrollment. The teachers who draw the biggest classes get paid the most. That’s the way it works in other forms of entertainment.
October 14, 2009, 10:48 pmPerseus says:
If you want to be a successful academic administrator, the first rule you have to follow is to not antagonize the faculty.
I thought that antagonizing the faculty was the raison detre of administrators.
You’d have to take into account required courses, and your metric fails to consider research, which is just as important for universities.
October 14, 2009, 11:09 pmRobert says:
“One possible objection is that the criteria for evaluating “merit” in academia are too subjective.”
This is as bogus an argument as that used by students who complain that tests are useless indicators. All metrics are flawed. Some more so than others, but that is not a sufficient reason to not use them.
There is no shortage of metrics that can be used to measure an academic’s performance: from teacher evaluations to publication numbers to service hours to citation counts etc….
The great irony in this discussion (which has been going on forever) is that professors don’t want to judged with the same haphazard grading that they impose on their students – even though I would venture to say that the metrics available to measure academic performance are superior and more varied than those available to measure student performance.
October 14, 2009, 11:12 pm_quodlibet_ says:
Instead of giving variable pay cuts, why not first institute an equal across-the-board salary cut and then give bonuses as normal. Same end result, but less resentment from variable pay cuts.
October 14, 2009, 11:15 pmIdeas, Rants and Raves | Today’s Links October 14, 2009 | Robert Vesco says:
[...] The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Merit-Based Pay Cuts for Academics? [...]
October 14, 2009, 11:41 pmSuzy says:
First, the standards for tenure and merit decisions are quite different, so if you assume that tenure decisions are reasonable enough and successful, it doesn’t necessarily follow that merit decisions are reasonable enough and successful. The other major difference between these two is that tenure is judged by comparing a candidate’s overall quality as an individual researcher and teacher, not by weighing the candidate’s progress against everyone else’s in a given year.
Second, the standards for determining merit pay within the timeframe of a single year are usually pretty bogus. One professor gets better teaching evals this year than another, because that professor got to teach upper level seminars that were more popular with the students, while the other prof taught less popular subjects. Professor x publishes three papers in year one and gets a small bonus, while next year x is preparing a new round of research and doesn’t publish as much, but that happens to be the budget cutting year, so x gets hammered with the biggest pay cut. Professor y is incredibly prolific in an area where it’s easier to get published. Some colleagues consider it a valuable topic, while others dismiss it as flimsy. How is y rated? How shall we weigh professor Z’s single major article (which ten years from now becomes a standard-bearer in the field, but we don’t know that yet) against 3 lesser articles from y that are swiftly forgotten?
All in all, merit pay for academics is a bogus enterprise. The idea of basing differentiated pay cuts on “merit”, as opposed to an across-the-board reduction, is even worse.
October 15, 2009, 1:34 amIlya Somin says:
First, the standards for tenure and merit decisions are quite different, so if you assume that tenure decisions are reasonable enough and successful, it doesn’t necessarily follow that merit decisions are reasonable enough and successful. The other major difference between these two is that tenure is judged by comparing a candidate’s overall quality as an individual researcher and teacher, not by weighing the candidate’s progress against everyone else’s in a given year.
No, tenure standards and hiring standards are based at least in part on what is generally expected of other scholars at the same stage in their careers. So comparative assessment plays a big role in both.
Second, the standards for determining merit pay within the timeframe of a single year are usually pretty bogus. One professor gets better teaching evals this year than another, because that professor got to teach upper level seminars that were more popular with the students, while the other prof taught less popular subjects. Professor x publishes three papers in year one and gets a small bonus, while next year x is preparing a new round of research and doesn’t publish as much, but that happens to be the budget cutting year, so x gets hammered with the biggest pay cut.
These are factors that should be taken into account in making merit pay comparisons. But I don’t see why they preclude comparisons altogether. To the contrary, a reasonably intelligent administrator could easily take such things into account.
October 15, 2009, 2:44 amAstonishing says:
As someone who has worked exclusively in the private sector, I find some of the arguments raised here astonishing. We have good enough data to determine whether to grant someone lifetime tenure but not enough data to do an annual performance evaluation? Seriously?
Unless we’re dealing with commissioned salespeople or performance-based compensation for hedge fund managers, there are almost never totally non-subjective criteria available to determine annual performance. How do you evaluate someone who works on multi-year projects? By judging them against their peers and against their objectives. There is no reason academia should be different.
The idea that academia is somehow so different from ordinary pursuits that merit-based compensation schemes simply can’t work demands a high burden of proof. Plus, if it were true, then academic output should be totally uncoupled from wages–which suggests one place to start saving money. If we can’t identify great output in order to assign monetary rewards, then cutting those monetary rewards shouldn’t affect the great academic output.
October 15, 2009, 3:04 amFaceword says:
In the law firm world, this is handled by “uniform” x% pay cuts. Then, separately, money is found to reward the high performers through bonuses or other means. That is, Bryan Caplan’s result is reached, but without the pain of having the perception that the cuts are performance based. Instead the cuts are uniform, but high performers are “rewarded” back to their original salary. Not rational, but effective.
October 15, 2009, 3:19 amNickM says:
Objective criteria will have some level of arbitrariness. How many law review articles equal revising a casebook?
All of the affected employees are very smart people. This is precisely the group most able to game the system by channeling efforts to areas most likely to result in extra pay.
Nick
October 15, 2009, 3:20 amsk says:
“All I can say in response is that if a merit-based pay cut system were adopted, I would be more than willing to have my work judged by the same standards as those applied to my colleagues.”
Hiring decisions are made based on a combination of previous performance and membership in desired/underrepresented groups (this is indubitable-in academia, in government service, and in larger private industry that can afford it). Are you sure you want to be judged on these two criteria?
Or perhaps you are assuming a truly ‘merit-based’ raise/cut process can be put in place, in spite of the failure to do so with regards to hiring, awards, promotions, etc etc etc?
Or, finally, you are merely postulating that, in a hypothetical intellectually honest environment, merit-based pay decisions would be justified? If so, what does that have to do with the actual universe?
Sk
October 15, 2009, 8:31 amWidmerpool says:
In the real world, the federal government does not subsidize the consumers of a company’s products so the company has little choice but to wage discriminate between high and low performers. But, in academia, the government provides ever increasing subsidies in the form of student loans and grants and those subsidies bear no relationship to the performance of professors. Why should the administrator discriminate between high- and low-performing professors when the government is indifferent to whether such discrimination takes place? Indeed, one could envision scenarios where the government would be opposed to such discrimination or would dispute the criteria for discrimination. In other words, academia is a racket and this notion of “market efficiency” a bad joke at the taxpayer’s expense.
October 15, 2009, 8:35 amSteve says:
But, in academia, the government provides ever increasing subsidies in the form of student loans and grants and those subsidies bear no relationship to the performance of professors.
Likewise, the government provides food stamps, which is why grocery stores don’t care if the produce is rotten.
October 15, 2009, 8:59 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
Per PJens, at least for public schools, salaries are published by law.
The dean could give the staff a choice between a merit-based cut system and an ostracism election–loser leaves town.
October 15, 2009, 9:02 amKen Arromdee says:
Food stamps are nowhere near the proportion of a grocery store’s income that student loans and grants are of a university’s.
It’s also a lot easier to tell that food is rotten than that a professor is.
October 15, 2009, 9:23 amBecky says:
Wow, no wonder we are screwed. Listening to a bunch of lawyers arguing about whether or not acedemics have to take pay cuts, not based on current economics, but lofty ideas of “it’s not fair”, which is always a good legal argument. The idea of actually losing jobs doesn’t seem to be in question, unlike the college graduates who are finding it difficult to even find a job at the seven eleven down the road.
Like Scalia said, I think we are churnning out too many lawyers who don’t produce anything.
October 15, 2009, 9:32 amMike says:
Things can work out desirably in the long term.
In the short term, everyone gets a 5% cut. But, as the department income increases, raises are distributed based on merit. If one sharpens the usual criteria (for instance if previously the top performer received twice the raise as the worst performer, make it four times) then in short time you can effect the same result.
October 15, 2009, 9:33 amMike says:
Lawyers contribute to producing accountability and justice, to enforcing the law, which are among the most important things in a society. These are the foundations of economic growth (corrupt societies are universally poor).
By Scalia’s form of superficial assessment, the fraction of Americans who “actually produce something” is small, and it accounts for an even smaller fraction of the national wealth. It’s an odd position for a conservative to take.
October 15, 2009, 9:44 amcorneille1640 says:
I don’t think this would work, at least at the undergraduate level, where a lot of classes, at least in my field (History), are filled simply because they are required.
October 15, 2009, 10:17 amcorneille1640 says:
One question I’ve had about faculty pay (I’m a grad student), is whether having tenure is a guarantee against pay cuts. In other words, when someone is given tenure, are they assured that they will never receive a cut in pay? I assume the answer varies according to the institution, but can anyone explain what they understand the standard agreement to be?
I ask, in part, because I suspect some of my university’s budget problems might be resolved by faculty pay cuts.
October 15, 2009, 10:20 amBryan says:
The real reason that this wouldn’t fly is that all too many tenured faculty don’t do *anything* scholarly post-tenure. So if a dean is to “punish” faculty who don’t produce with a pay cut (a quite reasonable proposal given the tenure constraints) he or she would be obligated, I suspect, to impose cuts to a pretty wide swathe of faculty, making him very, very unpopular.
October 15, 2009, 10:30 amShelbyC says:
Typicaly (outside acedemia) merit pay exists in a context of an organization trying to improve performance, and is part of a system designed to improve performance: Here is the organization’s goals, here are your goals derived from the organization’s goals, let’s meet a few times a year to see how we’re acheiving these goals and if they need to be tweeked, and at the end of the year, we’ll base your raise on this stuff.
Without the rest of the framework, you just have some administrator pulling some notion of “merit” out of his butt, which is not going to be productive.
October 15, 2009, 10:50 amyankee says:
This seems like a phenomenally bad idea. People are risk-averse and even more loss-averse. Combining losses with risk would guarantee bad morale among existing faculty and make it considerably more difficult to recruit new faculty.
As others have noted, it would be much better to achieve the same mathematical result with across-the-board pay cuts and merit-based pay increases. Framing matters.
October 15, 2009, 10:58 ammischief says:
and professors are worse. They, after all, went into a profession where they could get job security. (Not all of them, some of them were probably allured by other aspects of the field, but given that it’s an attraction, it’s very easy to work out who would be attracted to it.)
October 15, 2009, 11:43 amSandy MacHoots says:
It wouldn’t affect morale any more than it does in any other merit-based organization. In my experience there’s pretty general agreement on faculties about who are the top performers and who are the dead wood. The persistence of the dead wood and the failure to adequately reward excellence is itself a tremendous tax on faculty morale.
The real problem with merit pay in academia, as some have I think suggested, is that there is no bottom line for a nonprofit — no agreed-upon metric like “profits” to tell us if we’re doing well. Combine this with the fact that an individual faculty member’s success is entirely unrelated to the success or failures of his colleagues. Their failures don’t put his job at risk; their successes don’t make him any more money. There’s thus no market constraint on pay. Under those circumstances, you’d expect pay to be distributed not based on actual merit, but on what’s good for the administrators and those faculty members who support them.
Fixing that problem would require some radical surgery, like eliminating tenure and developing some agreed-upon benchmarks for performance. I wonder whether some of the for-profit schools are developing ways to measure and reward actual excellence in faculties. That could give them a huge advantage in the years ahead.
October 15, 2009, 12:15 pmMartin Boileau says:
My chair just asked our thoughts on merit-based pay cuts. I will give below some of my thoughts on this topic.
At the CU-Boulder campus, all normal pay increases are merit based. There are no cost-of-living adjustments. The principles by which we compute pay increases recognize all sorts of details discussed in previous comments. For example, we recognize that some people have good years and bad years, so we take a three-year moving average. We recognize that some undergraduate courses are less likely to yield high teaching evaluations than others, so we weight them differently. None of this is hard to do.
It would then appear that applying these rules to a merit-based pay reduction would be simple. There are however important differences. In our merit-based pay increase, there is an absolute minimum pay increase for everyone no matter where they are in the pay distribution. In nominal terms, nobody gets a pay reduction. Also, there is a free maximum pay increase: the entirety of the increase pool. So, it is possible (but perhaps unlikely) for one individual to get the entire pay pool as an increase, while the rest gets nothing. What is not permitted, however, is a nominal redistribution from one (in the form of a pay reduction) to another (in the form of a pay increase). The implication is that the absolute minimum of your nominal wage after increase is set to the previous wage, and it is true for everyone.
With this in mind, can we come up with a scheme that will mimic our standard practices? There are at least two issues to be concerned about. One, schemes that affect a distribution involve some non-linearity. This implies that pay increases and pay cuts are different. Second, it is interesting to study why we came up with the absolute minimum.
First, to mimic our pay increase, the pay-cuts have to be very tricky, because they involve a non-trivial non-linearity. As an example, consider the following scheme that imposes an absolute minimum to everyone. First, reset the distribution of wages to have a lower mean (but not change the other moments of the wage distribution). For example, cut everyone by an absolute (not proportional) amount, say 10K. This new distribution of wages would be the absolute nominal minimum. Then apply merit increase on this amount. Unfortunately, this scheme may violate the other two principles. That is, the no-redistribution clause precludes having anyone get a higher wage from the previous year, and thus imposes an absolute maximum to the pay increase from the new floor.
Of course, the proposed scheme would be perhaps more fair (to your best performers) than simply cutting everyone’s salary by say 5%. Also, the non-linearity may not be quantitatively important.
Second,it is interesting to study why the merit-based increases have an absolute nominal minimum. I must admit that our pay increase rules have been reviewed by the faculty in the departments at frequent intervals. I have been here 11 years, and we have reviewed the rules 3 times. No one has ever questioned the absolute minimum and the no nominal redistribution clause. For example, the pay pool was 0 last year, so no one got a pay increase. We could have come up with a merit-based reshuffling of the wages, but decided against it. That is, the top performers in the department did not start asking for it. Why is that so?
My own interpretation is that we (as a group in the department) recognize that we have to be fair about both the internal distribution of wages and the external distribution of wages. That is, we don’t live in a vacuum. In some sense, our scheme provides some insurance to members of the department. Certainly what is not the case, is some form of “ah we know you guys are all communists.” The current distribution of salaries in my department has the top paid performers making at 2.5 to 3 times as much as the lowest paid. As an example, if the low paid is 80K, the high pay is 240K. Sizeable differences!
October 15, 2009, 12:16 pmcorneille1640 says:
I wonder if “merit pay,” in practice, would actually result in a lot more very poor to mediocre scholarship being published. I know some professors who, after receiving tenure, basically just phoned it in and gave the bare minimum. But I know others who got tenure and didn’t publish anything afterward, but carried a huge share of the committee work and a lot of the other thankless tasks that need to get done but aren’t done by the superstar publishers. (There are some professors who both publish a lot and do a lot of the grunt work, too.)
I would hope that any “merit pay” system would look beyond a mere focus on publications.
October 15, 2009, 12:18 pmGallileo says:
Those worried about cuts hurting the ability of the university to recruit are wrong to worry about it.
The academic job market is way oversupplied with very talented–but desperate–people dying for a position. There aren’t many other jobs to go to for many professors, especially in the humanities and arts.
Just like the big tech law firms–which cut associates during the tech crunch, and cut both associates and partners with the housing crash–have no trouble recruiting.
October 15, 2009, 12:36 pmyankee says:
Merit cuts are different than merit pay. People dislike losses more than they like gains, even if it leads to the same financial results. Since one of the principal benefits of being a professor is protection from loss (termination), academia probably draws people who are even more loss-averse than the general population. If faculty dislike having their salaries cut, they’re really going to dislike being judged against their peers in the same department to decide just how big the cut should be. Being singled out for a bigger loss feels different from getting a smaller raise.
October 15, 2009, 12:38 pmgeokstr says:
I have it! A federal Academic Pay Czar!
With unlimited power to award pay raises, bonuses, and pay cuts based on political ideology, including clawback provisions and ex post facto powers, with waivers on any bill of attainders problems.
While the left may like that now, god forbid a conservative ever gets elected again. We’ve got 50 years of payback for academia coming.
October 15, 2009, 1:10 pmJohn says:
I have sent one of my children thru a “good” school and the other will graduate next year and judging by the observed result the teachers are very heavily OVER PAID now. Merit based pay sort of hints that the instructors that currently exist are acceptable, that assumtion is wrong. My pet lab shows more itelligence than some of the profeesors I have meet over the last 3 or 4 years.
October 15, 2009, 1:12 pmScott says:
The problem with this proposal can be found in Machiavelli’s classic The Dean (1513):
“Never did a dean lack legitimate reasons by which to color his bad faith”
October 15, 2009, 1:26 pmMike K says:
I would offer the modest proposal that parents be given a vote in merit raises/cuts. I have a very good idea about which of my daughter’s instructors deserve attention. I’ll wager other parents feel the same after comparing the curriculum, and the instructors, to those of 30 years ago.
October 15, 2009, 1:33 pmSuzy says:
Sure, but the comparisons themselves are not of the same kind. When you apply for tenure, you’re being compared against other scholars at the same stage in their careers. When you receive merit pay, you’re being compared against your own colleagues in a specified time frame, even though each person has a different set of responsibilities that will affect how they qualify for merit. There is no obvious measurement like widget sales or heavier brains in the students to base such a decision upon.
I honestly don’t see how that’s going to happen. If we can reach into other years to judge meritorious performance in 2009–to account for the person who publishes like wildfire during the “small bonus” years, but then has a lull during the “big pay cuts” year–then the professors should simply be stacking their whole careers up against one another. And then, what was the merit pay about?
This is the crucial underlying issue: before you can award merit pay (or cuts) to professors, you have to figure out what it is you’re trying to reward or punish, and ensure that your system of doing so is really going to motivate the kinds of behaviors you prefer. Merit-based pay cuts are going to motivate the worst possible behaviors, for reasons others have detailed above. Merit-based pay in general does very little to reward the deserving, if we could even agree on standards. Yes, academia is very much unlike other professions, in that you cannot easily measure the “output”. What is the output even supposed to be?
The REAL rewards come when someone publishes like a maniac, or gains as major reputation as a good teacher, and parlays that into other engagements, like fellowships, speakers fees, jobs at higher-paying institutions, additional responsibilities in the current job that enhance pay, or opportunities for paid leave. Merit pay is a trivial effect on behavior compared to these large golden carrots.
Simple point: if you’re going to dock pay, dock everyone’s pay, because you don’t have defensible criteria for doing it any other way that won’t result in disaster.
October 15, 2009, 1:40 pmSuzy says:
For those of you arguing that your kids’ teachers did a lousy job, I’d like to know the evidence on which you base that decision, because maybe it could tell us something about what academic “output” is supposed to be. Did your young adult emerge having failed to gain certain skills, despite having earned a good grade for having demonstrated them? Did the professor address topics that seemed unworthy, or neglect duties to the students? Was the professor not a trustworthy expert in the field, or not capable of communicating information and coaching skills that the course was supposed to provide? I’m honestly curious.
October 15, 2009, 1:45 pmFat Man says:
Kill them all. God will know his own.
October 15, 2009, 1:57 pmBen Rice says:
If they thought like business people instead of academics, they’d institute an across-the-board 3% pay cut and after a given time “reinstate” the pay by 1%, 2%, or 3% based on merit.
October 15, 2009, 2:38 pmwillis says:
What are the odds that a professor who lands a staggeringly large research grant will be given a merit pay cut, even if he/she is virtually incoherent in the classroom.
October 15, 2009, 3:01 pmwillis says:
“Was the professor not a trustworthy expert in the field, or not capable of communicating information and coaching skills that the course was supposed to provide? I’m honestly curious.”
Suzy, as long as you are honestly curious. How about the professor that just reads the material to the class, or sent an assistant with such a bad accent he/she is virtually incoherent? It happens.
October 15, 2009, 3:06 pmBama 1L says:
That’s exactly what mainstream academics would do: share the pain equally, then go back to the normal merit-based raise system when the budget picture brightened. It’s weirdos at GMU who are coming up with this merit-based cut proposal. I’m sure they imagine that they are taking a rational, business-minded approach. The fact is that people, rationally or not, think about pay cuts completely differently from pay raises, particularly if the pay cuts are the result of a bad overall economic climate and have no connection to the enterprise’s performance. But sophisticated understanding of how people actually think, though important to business success, was never one of law and econ’s selling points.
The other contrast to business is that, in most enterprises, if you are thinking about pay cuts, it’s probably because your business has contracted. Not so academia. In fact enrollments continue to climb. So, if you are an instructor whose pay has been cut, you are actually having to do more work for less pay. This may be significantly more, since before faculty salaries were cut, you probably already lost some teaching assistantships, eliminated the photocopy budget, halved travel funds, and didn’t replace the secretary who retired.
October 15, 2009, 3:06 pmBama 1L says:
Zero. In related news, the salesman who landed the big account kept his job even though even he agrees he’s a jerk to everyone in the office.
October 15, 2009, 3:08 pmSuzy says:
Willis, that’s exactly the sort of case that concerns me. A person who can’t teach but who can bring in research money is likely to win on an analysis of merit. But as Bama 1L’s comment points out, that happens only if you don’t care about teaching. Presumably, making the office environment more pleasant is a desirable but much lesser goal compared to high sales, but I’d hope that teaching students well is an extremely important goal for academics.
I agree with Martin Boileau’s observation that more effective strategies to measure performance can be devised (and yes, that would answer some of the doubts I’m raising); my point is that the strategies won’t be tight enough to counteract the negative effects of a differentiated pay cut, and that the whole ball of wax depends on making certain decisions about what you value as the “output”, if such a term makes sense here. The output may well be a collaborative enterprise that prepares young lawyers for the rigors of their careers, in which case that tough old curmudgeon they trash in the evals may be just as important to their success as the popular young superstar who publishes a lot. See what I mean?
October 15, 2009, 3:26 pmnevinscrna says:
I can hear the helicopter blades now as the over-involved parent swoops in on their collage age child. My parents didn’t know, or care to know, anything about my college profs. It was my job to make the most of my education; accomplishing what one needs despite the boss’s(profs) abilities is just another of life’s lessons better learned earlier rather than later.
October 15, 2009, 3:46 pmCato The Elder says:
Teaching quality is overrated as a metric of rating academics. You have to be an extremely good teacher for it to make a substantial difference in the learning trajectory of students able to handle college-level material. The reason T-25 universities are rated where they are is not because of the superlative teaching qualities of their professoriat, but much more because of the superlative peer quality they offer to prospective students, among other things. Most talented students I’ve taught learned far more outside of the classroom than within it, no matter how engaged I fancied myself.
October 15, 2009, 4:05 pmJiffy says:
A significant problem with merit-based pay cuts is the transaction costs and delay they would involve. Faculty merit reviews generally involve elaborate procedures, including assembly of promotion dossiers, solicitation of evaluation letters, review and vote by department faculty, multiple further levels of review, and possible appeals. Doing all of that for every member of the faculty at once would take more time than response to budget crises allow and would consume enormous resources.
October 15, 2009, 4:08 pmNeo says:
I worked at a company that went from 14,000 employees to about 4,000 over a few years. The whole idea of evaluations got real weird, especially since there were fixed quotas for “exceptional,” “average” and “poor” workers.
October 15, 2009, 4:12 pmOnce half the workforce had been laid off, the idea that there might be any “poor workers” left became academic .. if there were any, their managers should be the next to go. When somebody quit, they were assigned the “poor” designation just to fill some part of the quota, no matter how good they had been. The quota was the quota.
yankee says:
Isn’t this just another way of saying that U.S. News mostly rates colleges based on entering students’ GPA’s and SAT scores, plus a few other factors like the acceptance rate? They don’t make any effort to measure teaching quality, so of course that doesn’t factor into the rankings.
October 15, 2009, 4:32 pmShelbyC says:
Anyway, how does tenure affect pay cuts? Seems kinda pointless to have job security without pay security. Can they cut pay to zero?
October 15, 2009, 4:48 pmMark Field says:
There’s a lot of truth in what Cato says. I think of it like athletics. Basketball players get better when forced to play against better players. More important, they actually get worse when they play weaker players (because the better players get sloppy).
Where I disagree is in the efficiency of the process. Yes, I can learn to swim if someone throws me in the pool. But it’s more efficient if a good teacher shows me what to do. That’s why John Wooden was a great basketball coach and others were, well, not.
October 15, 2009, 4:50 pmSnowguy says:
Tenured faculty contemplating single-digit pay cuts, eh? Meanwhile, in the world outside the faculty lounge, businesses go under, jobs are actually lost, and people are going bankrupt.
Hey, professors, how about another reading of Mask of Red Death?
October 15, 2009, 5:04 pmleofromlansing says:
Or, better yet, you could eschew tenure and insist that the University be allowed to discharge you at any time.
You know, free market and all that.
October 15, 2009, 6:10 pmDJ says:
The trouble with this speculation is that you’re only looking at a small set of the outcomes of “deciding” to become a professor — i.e., going to grad school. No rational person would think, “I hate loss, therefore I’ll enter a tournament where the vast majority end up dropping out, getting no job, getting only a job with no security (adjuncting), or not getting tenure; but if I win then I’ll have job security.” Yet those are the facts facing people deciding whether to go take a job in the private sector — at least when there were such jobs to be had — or going to graduate school. If you look at an entering grad school class and then project 10-15 years down the road, risk aversion (or loss) aversion does not favor deciding to attempt to become a professor. And that’s the decision you make: to attempt it. Not “being a [tenured] professor.”
Of course, people aren’t all that rational. But that fact undermines your speculation in a different way.
October 15, 2009, 7:16 pmGeoff says:
It’s remarkable that nobody has mentioned that many universities (mine included) have unionized faculty and all pay reductions would have to be negotiated with the union leadership. Here at Wayne State there is a complex procedure for a combination of across-the-board and merit-based raises. There is no procedure for cuts. I note that in California they are having ‘furloughs’, which amount to pay cuts. They are all across-the-board too (the California publics are all unionized too).
October 15, 2009, 10:06 pmThere is no chance of pay cuts of any kind at a unionized campus, no matter how rational (or how tempting–speaking as someone who got the highest merit evaluation our college can give, and who therefore got a $200/year merit raise this year).
Cato The Elder says:
Replace “rating” with “esteem” then. I was merely noting that the general populace draws the wrong conclusion from the professional success of graduates from elite schools: that is, it is commonly believed that the teaching quality of those institutions is a primary factor that imparts much of the germ of their success — not true. To the extent that Harvard “makes the man”, rather than the students “making” Harvard, it is most assuredly by offering inquisitive and intelligent minds an adequate playpen to think and interact with one another.
October 15, 2009, 10:29 pmPerseus says:
Indeed we are, but the pay cut is supposedly matched by a commensurate reduction in the workload (I can’t tell you how very upset students are about having fewer class meetings). And hell will freeze over before the union agrees to merit-based pay cuts.
October 15, 2009, 10:43 pmBama 1L says:
He’ll do it, you know. But please let’s not have another Somin tenure post.
October 15, 2009, 10:55 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Bama, you’re the only 1L I’ve ever run across who had so much sympathy for the profs. In my experience, academics aren’t all that great about sharing the pain. That only happens once they’ve slashed jobs and pay and benefits for less exalted folks like, uh, staff. And they have no trouble keeping their incomes intact by raising tuition on the
hapless sheep who are running up $100K in debt in desperate hopes of gaining a better lifestudents. And then they suddenly find it convenient to ratchet up the tenure process to knock those who might get tenure (and a pay raise) so that they can be replaced with entry-level folks.I can’t say it hasn’t happened at some time at some school or other, but the day I see a group of middle-aged tenured faculty members agree to take pay cuts to protect the job of a high-school-graduate single mom supporting her family as a secretary or security guard, is the day I’ll — well, I don’t know what I’ll do. Suffer cerebral hemorrhage, maybe.
BTW, I love the argument that our “best and brightest” law school academics are too mentally challenged to realize that an “across the board cut” followed by a “merit raise” is exactly the same thing as a “merit pay cut.” Every practicing lawyer knows that pay goes up and pay goes down, depending on how the firm is doing. Yet the the rocket scientists of legal education (except the L&E types?) can’t figure this out?
Exactly how many of the geniuses are in the Obama Administration?
October 16, 2009, 2:21 amSuzy says:
Whether or not U.S. News or other such groups measure it, there is a significant difference in faculty quality between the best schools in the country and the lower-ranked schools that pay smaller salaries and demand a higher workload. Some people at the lower-ranked schools are still just as good, but as you go down that list they become fewer and farther between, they’re worked harder, and you have to get through the big lecture hall prerequisites in order to have access to them.
This is a crucial point because this is the real “merit pay” in academia–not this $200 raise that the prof. from Wayne State was mentioning above. If you’re a hot shot on the job market, you can land one of those top jobs, at a highly-ranked law school where your responsibilities are fewer, or at a Ph.D. institution with low workload and grad students to help you, or a fancy small college that pays you a large salary for an idyllic lifestyle. Whether you then get a few hundred bucks more or less a year will have little to no impact on your “output”. However, asking faculty members to downgrade each other based on who is least worthy is a recipe for constant conflict in every department, even worse than usual.
October 16, 2009, 11:17 amSandy MacHoots says:
This is certainly true, if by “quality” you mean “non-doctrinal scholarship.” The teaching quality at the top schools, however, is usually no better, and often much worse, than at lower-ranked schools. This isn’t surprising, since lower-ranked schools tend to value good teaching (which leads to student satisfaction) more highly than do top-tier schools. Some schools are famous for not teaching anything. (New associates used to say, “Oh, I didn’t go to law school. I went to Yale.”) I remember Harold Koh once saying that when he got to Yale he was stunned by how little the faculty valued teaching.
Contrary to Suzy’s suggestion, you’re much more likely to have extensive contact with the faculty at the teaching-oriented schools, and more likely to have senior tenured faculty teaching the big required courses instead of tiny seminars. Faculty at lower-tier schools spend proportionately more time on teaching because they spend, on average, less time on scholarship. And their scholarship is more often doctrinal — stuff that tends to be more useful to law students — rather than cutting edge theoretical work.
As to workload, while there may be some, I don’t know a single fourth-tier school where the standard workload is more than six classroom hours a week, which is what it was pretty much everywhere not so long ago. True, at some of the top schools faculty may get down to three hours teaching a week, and those three hours may be in “Interesting Issues in My Specialty,” limited to 20 students.
This is not to disparage a top-tier degree — if you get admitted to Harvard or Stanford or Chicago and you can afford it you should go because of the cachet. (Or even Yale, if you want to be a professor.) But don’t expect stellar teaching. That’s simply not what they’re paying their faculty to do. Employers will hire you because you’re smart enough to get into Harvard, not because they think you learned anything there.
October 16, 2009, 1:10 pmChrisTS says:
Gee, you must be really old. :-)
Why would any parent think s/he had reliable knowledge of what a professor is doing? Think of the reasons against such a notion:
1) Sometimes the student/kid tells the parent something that is important and true, but more often the student/kid relates his or her very limited perspective. And in some, cases – brace yourselves parents! – our kids are less than honest with us.
2) As parents, we are likely to know no more than our kids do about the subject matter of any given course.
3) We parents are biased. Of course little Jenny is a mathematical genius. Similarly, everyone in the family knows that little Bobby is a gifted writer.
And we are interested in less than objective ways. Some years ago, a woman did everything she could think of to ruin the reputation of one of my junior colleagues – because she did not want to pay for an expensive summer course in order for her slacker child to graduate. Once I explained to her that he could take a course at their local cc to complete his elective credits, she and he disappeared from our radar.
I am a parent and a professor. I do not want to weigh in on the pay of my kids’ professors.
October 16, 2009, 7:58 pmChrisTS says:
Sandy McHoots:
But in-class hours are not ‘the workload.’ Quite apart from scholarship, faculty – especially at teaching-intensive colleges – spend lots of time with students [advising and tutoring], preparing materials, correcting work, attending workshops to improve their teaching, mentoring student groups, and doing college service. And so on.
This meme of ‘hours in class’ is one of the reasons that professors believe non-academics have no clue as to what we do. And, please, please, do not even start on the ‘summers off’ nonsense.
There are many wonderful features of being a professor. Light workload is not, for the majority of us, one of them.
October 16, 2009, 8:04 pmChrisTS says:
DJ:
Well said.
Of course, if people going to grad school were ‘rational,’ they would also take into consideration the years they must scrape along at grad-student-life level, making no money and possibly incurring debt. Many of them [depending on field] would also consider that an academic career requires living where the job-one-lands is – family and other interests be darned. They would think about what this would mean for a partner and children or for the prospects of staying with said partner. Those going into certain fields would reflect on the fact that they will be paid considerably less than others whose doctoral work is typically of less duration. And so on.
But most people embarking on graduate education for academic careers, especially recent college graduates, are not rational in this narrow sense. They are responding to an avocation, not seeking a vocation. They are enamored of their field. Some of them will want to go to research institutions and avoid undergraduates as much as their own graduate professors did. Others will want to share their love of the field with undergraduates. The very existence of such people, in and out of academe, is further evidence of the poverty of the currently dominant conception of ‘rationality’ in economic and, I gather, legal circles.
October 16, 2009, 8:20 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I know a few faculty members who work almost as hard as partners at big law firms. Not very many. I know a lot who spend about as much time at the job as the average UAW worker. And they do get the summers off, if they like.
I wasn’t suggesting that we work 6 hours a week. I was pointing out that the workload at bottom-tier law schools is pretty much the same as it is at upper-tier law schools.
As far as your description of the work, you’re not talking about law school. Most law faculty, even at teaching-oriented schools, don’t correct work, because there aren’t usually any assignments during the semester. All grading is based on the final exam. (In some seminars you will give feedback on papers during the semester, but you usually don’t have more than about 20 seminar students in a semester.) Most faculty spend little time preparing materials because most courses rely on standard casebooks and the Socratic method. I know very few faculty who’ve attended workshops to improve their teaching, chiefly because most schools don’t value teaching. “College service” is usually tedious committee meetings to decide issues that could be better decided in less time by staff who know what they’re doing — it’s mostly make-work.
The long lines at the Faculty Recruitment Conference aren’t there because people want to work harder than they’re doing in the big law firms . . . .
October 17, 2009, 11:55 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Your definition of “rational” is too narrow. Where did you get the idea that economics postulates that everyone makes every choice solely on the basis of money? There’s nothing “irrational” about choosing a career for things other than convenience and money. Nor is there anything “irrational” about pursuing a career (such as acting, professional baseball, or art history) in which only a handful of hopefuls can succeed. I don’t think any economist would argue that there is.
So long as colleges can make money off graduate students in over-subscribed fields, we’ll continue to turn out lots of these hopefuls.
October 18, 2009, 12:06 amChrisTS says:
Sandy:
True; I was thinking about professors in general.
I don’t think all economists hold this view. Some folks who post here seem to think this.
October 18, 2009, 2:21 pm