The high standard deviations, or average distance of the reported salaries from the area group mean, indicate that the salary levels in several of the groups vary widely; for example, one faculty member in Behavioral and Social Sciences reported a salary of $74,000 at the Assistant Professor level, while the remainder of the salaries reported by Assistant and Associate Professors in that area ranged from $46,000 to $51,200. In these instances, a more accurate indicator of area salary levels may be the median, or the salary amount that falls exactly in the center of the reported salaries (in this example, $49,700). Figure 1 demonstrates the distribution of salaries by quartile, with the median salary levels depicted by the dark horizontal line in the box.
FIGURE 1. The boxplot and whisker diagram above demonstrates that a few faculty members who reported their salaries are earning substantially more than the median salary for their group. Influential outliers are indicated in Math and Science, Agriculture, Food Science, and Sustainable Systems, and Education. Statistically significant outliers were identified in Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1 and in English/LLP. No boxes were created for Mass Communications or Whitney Young because only one faculty member from each program responded to the survey.
Another source of the wide variability among the reported salaries may be accounted for by the academic rank of the faculty who responded to this question. For example, in Mathematics and Science, faculty salaries reported at the Assistant Professor level are quite low, ranging from $42,400 to $47,000, while faculty salaries at the Associate Professor level range from $50,900 to $71,000, thus inflating the mean.
A third source of possible bias in these data may be minimal faculty response from several areas. For example, only one faculty member responded from Whitney Young, and one from Mass Communications, and only two faculty members responded from Fine Arts. These low response rates may in fact be due to the low number of faculty currently serving in these areas, as many areas are understaffed.
Although these data represent the responses of a subset of the faculty members at Kentucky State University, they provide clear evidence that faculty compensation in many areas is inconsistent both within areas and across areas.