This study looks closely at how academic department chair are compensated giving detailed data on how much, and how they are paid, according to what rules or formulas, if any, and including non-monetary compensation such as relaxation of teaching and research loads. The study enables its reader to pinpoint exactly how much chair earn for their efforts, and to break down this data by general subject field, type of college or university and other variables. It also includes detailed data on how many hours chair work, and on whether or not they have the help of one or more vice chair.
Data in the report is broken out by many variables including the size, type and tuition level of the department chair’s college or university, its public or private status, world college/university ranking as well as the subject field of the academic department, length of tenure of the department chair, and other variables. Data is also broken out separately for US and Canadian institutions.
This report presents data from a survey of 198 department chairs from 112 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.
Just a few of the 63-page reports many findings are that:
10% of departments sampled had more than one vice chair
-
Mean chair compensation was twice as high in public than in private colleges.
-
23.23% of US departments sampled base chair compensation on a percentage of base salary.
-
Nearly 91% of Canadian chairs received some degree of teaching load reassignment as part of their compensation for being chair.
-
Chair who did not receive any form of reduced teaching or scholarship load reassignment earned a mean of $12.82 per hour as department chair,
-
Load reassignment was negatively correlated with institutional tuition level, the lower the tuition, the greater the likelihood of load reassignment for chairs.
-
Chairs from private colleges were much more likely than those from public ones to receive their chair stipend during sabbaticals – nearly 23% of them did so.