SMU Aspires to Greatness Except for Salaries & Benefits

[Stallion]

DiamondM you do realize that Carnegie-Mellon is rated the No. 8 University in the Nation by U. S. News & World Report. Only one school in the first survey was Not Tier 1 and that was SMU.

[SoCal_Pony]

I live in California.

My state income tax rate is 10%.

Texas is 0%

[DiamondM]

Stallion, I saw them listed at 22. But you also realize that the US News rankings take into account things like Faculty Compensation (35% of the Faculty Resources Score, which is 20% of the overall score and 15% more is the number of faculty with the top terminal degree.) It's a vicious circle isn't it? Not only are we directly penalized in the rankings for paying faculty lower than other schools, we are indirectly penalized by the fact that we can't attract more faculty with PhDs in their field, and by the fact that our inability to attract them probably has an inpact in other measured areas such as peer review.

Also taken into account is alumni giving, and we are repeatedly pretty abyssmal in this category compared to universities I think we should be in the same sentence with -- despite the relative wealth of our alumni.

So saying "those are top tier" so why should be pay like top tier is just a circular argument. You can make yourself top tier by paying top tier salaries. I don't think you wait to become top tier before doing it.

[CalallenStang]

As for cost of living, I know from experience that it the cost of living is quite a bit less in the nicest parts of Durham than anything equivalent here (althought the calculator I used for the other cities I was less familiar with said it's more expensive to live in the greater Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area than in Dallas). Winston Salem is less expensive. Pittsburg and Nashville are slightly less expensive than Dallas, and Atlanta is only slightly more expensive by the same margin. South Bend is over 10% cheaper to live in than Dallas.

How many Duke professors do you believe actually live in Durham? The Duke campus is set up so that it is just as easy to get to from Chapel Hill as it is from Durham. My guess is that a huge majority of professors live in the Chapel Hill area. BTW, what constitutes the "nicest parts of Durham?" What I saw of that city (which, mind you, was a good 85% of the city) reminded me that there is still rampant poverty in America.

Winston-Salem is less expensive. Pittsburgh and Nashville are about on the same level as Dallas, I would say. South Bend is a lot cheaper than Dallas. But every other city on that list is a lot more expensive than DFW. I've been to most of the cities...I'll rank them as I see them here (more $$$ means more expensive):

Northwestern - Evanston/Chicago $$$$$
Duke - Durham/Chapel Hill $$$
Dartmouth - Hanover, NH $$$$
USC - Los Angeles $$$$
Carnegie-Mellon - Pittsburgh $$
Emory - Atlanta $$$
Vandy - Nashville $$
Notre Dame - South Bend $
Brown - Providence $$$$
Wake Forest - Winston-Salem $ + 1/2
Tulane - New Orleans - N/A
Brandeis - Waltham/Boston $$$$$
SMU - University Park/Dallas $$

[EastStang]

Are these statistics base compensation or total compensation including grant income? Many schools keep all of the grant income and give their faculty higher salaries. It was my impression that SMU had a fixed percentage of grant income that went to the contributing faculty members. My impression has been that at SMU a star prof who generates tons of research and articles makes more than one of his cohorts at other universities. Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but that was what I had heard.