This is an interesting document, for those curious about the economics of elite higher education. It is mostly concerned with how Yale salaries and benefits compare with its competitors (including Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, and Michigan, among others). Basic salaries are about in the middle of the pack for Yale's private competitors, although I strongly suspect the comparison with some of these schools is misleading, since places like Stanford, Chicago, and Columbia are also including law and business school faculty in the mix, not just "arts & sciences" faculty as I take it the Yale report is. (A giveaway is that at the "Associate" rank, median Chicago salaries trail Yale's, even though Chicago comes out ahead at the rank of "Professor" and "Assistant Professor." But there is no "Associate" rank in the Law School, and very few "Associate Professors" in the Business School, so I strongly suspect the higher salaries in law and business are driving up the medians. This also makes Princeton's median salaries especially notable, since they have neither a law school nor a business school. Given how breathtakingly wealthy Princeton is, this isn't surprising.)
I was stunned at how poor the college tuition benefit for children of faculty at Yale is compared to Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford, each of which will pay a portion of the home institution's tuition towards college anywhere else--Chicago's is the highest, set at 75% of Chicago tuition, but Columbia and Stanford are both 50% (the report says misleadingly that the Chicago tuition benefit is "taxable under some circumstances": there's only one circumstance where that is true, namely, when a tenured faculty member is dead, in which case the tuition benefit is now a supplemental bit of life insurance available for education). Yale's is worth less than half as much as Chicago's (Princeton's is also quite low). The theory among Yale and Princeton administrators may be that the money is better used for salaries in competitive situations, and that may be right, although if you have two kids in college at Chicago at the same time, it's tantamount to an extra 125k+ in pre-tax income in those years; part of me doubts market pressures generate comparable outcomes, and a risk-adverse faculty member with lots of kids wouldn't be irrational to go with Chicago over Yale under these circumstances. (Certainly our decision to go and remain at Chicago was strongly influenced by the tuition benefit, although of course not only that.)
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