Project Goals Question Are IU graduate students in particular AIs and GAs paid less in comparison to peers at other Big Ten institutions A comparative study of the Big Ten designed to look at ID: 136071
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Big Ten SAA StipendsSlide2
Project Goals
Question: Are IU graduate students - in particular AIs and GAs- paid less in comparison to peers at other Big Ten institutions?
A comparative study of the Big Ten designed to look at:
Average graduate student stipends (preferably by department)
And Values of tuition waivers and benefits
While taking into consideration variation in the cost of livingSlide3
Data Problems
Questions arise about the comparability and accuracy of data along many lines. These include:
How much time and effort each school spends on collecting the data
How accurate and recent the reported data is
Consistency in typology and measurement across institutionsSlide4
Problems with Graduate Stipend Data
Many schools have been less than willing to provide data
In other cases, responses are slow (if at all) to requests for information
Unions have generally provided data, but that means that the source is different than the data collected through the institutions themselves (both of these have their own agendas)
Often cannot release the number of students receiving a stipend because of FERPA
This impacts our ability to analyze the data
As well as leaving out important information as to how many students are funded at a give institution Slide5
Problems with Benefits Data
Have crude number break-down of costs/co-pays at each school
Still trying to contact Dan Rives in HR who has (or is?) conducting a comparative study of benefits across the Big Ten
Benefits data is important because it is easier to rally around benefits - which are constant across all graduate students - than stipends, which vary widelySlide6
Problems with Cost-of-Living Data
Very few reliable measures
These often rely on an initial ‘salary’ in one city and then compare to another - so always relative
And are often based on mortgage rates
Can look at each school’s estimate - yet IU’s is estimated the second highest in the Big Ten at $18,046 (Northwestern is first at $24,111).Slide7
Pre-Existing Data
Miscellaneous sources
The Chronicle of Higher Education report for 2003-2004
Salary.com reports an average “College Teaching Assistant” salary for many cities
‘Purdue Report’ (Council on Institutional Cooperation)
But all of these are problematic
And there are many inconsistenciesSlide8
National Research Council’s Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs
A survey of Research-Doctorate Programs conducted roughly every 10 years
Will theoretically provide all of the graduate stipend information we need (data will be from 2004-2005
And will be available to us when it is released in early October - November
Yet, some hesitations about variation in the quality of the data across institutions
But would allow us to look at peer institutions as well as the Big TenSlide9
Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE)
Has recently started gathering data on graduate stipends
But all data must be ‘blind’ to other institutions because of confidentiality agreements
And cannot be provided at the departmental level for other institutions
Aggregates are problematic as the programs under consideration at each school varies substantially
I.e. Indiana’s Medical school and School of Public Health are both located on the IUPUI campus, whereas they are on the flagship campus at Ohio State, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc.Slide10
Data that we do
have …
… has been collected from:
Unions
Administrators
AAUDE
Information that is available online (I.e. the value of tuition waivers is readily reported by schools)
GEO (crude data on health care benefits in the Big Ten)Slide11
AAUDE Data for Big Ten Schools Slide12
Tentative ComparisonsSlide13
Trends from this data
Yes, we do appear to be paid less
But the disparity is greater in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences than in the Hard Sciences
However, the data we have is probably not going to pass close inspection by anyone familiar with statistics because of many of the problems outlined aboveSlide14
Recommendations
There is evidence that this is worth pursuing
And these questions can explore that in more depth/with more accuracy when the NRC data is published later this fall
Or can do a less in-depth report, such as one compiled by Wisconsin faculty in 2005 which offered selective examples of the disparity
In this report, they used readily available data in select disciplines, such as Mathematics or English
And paired this with survey information from department chairs and faculty members at their own institution