The Public Law School Advantage

Those of us who teach at public law schools can take heart in this article in Inside Higher Ed:  The Public (Non-Salary) Advantage, by Scott Jaschik:

When it comes to faculty salaries, there’s little doubt that public higher education is at a real disadvantage these days. Private institutions pay more. According to the most recent salary data from the American Association of University Professors, private pay is more in all sectors of higher education. ...

A study released Monday by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (or COACHE) suggests that public colleges may have some advantages, at least once money is set aside. COACHE, which is based at Harvard University, has conducted a series of surveys of thousands of junior faculty members, trying to identify factors that make them satisfied (or not) with their jobs. Much of the analysis of the data has focused on the way female and minority faculty members are less likely than their white, male counterparts to feel good about their positions.

But a new look at that data finds that on a number of key factors related to tenure, public institutions outperform private institutions in the eyes of junior professors. Professors at public institutions were more likely than those at privates to consider that the tenure process and tenure standards are clear, and that expectations about job performance were reasonable. In addition, public college faculty rated four of five categories of questions on work/family balance more favorably than did their private college counterparts. While the data are not broken out to allow for comparisons only of universities, COACHE has previously reported that on many of these job satisfaction categories, smaller colleges outperform larger universities. Many of the small colleges in the survey are private, suggesting that they may be boosting even lower scores from private universities.

The findings could be significant because other studies from COACHE have found that junior professors place increasing importance on factors like the clarity of the tenure process in evaluating their employers. These findings go against the long-standing tradition in higher education that institutions that pay well and have impressive reputations need not think much about how professors (especially those without tenure) are treated.