Junior Faculty Satisfaction
The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education just released the highlights of their survey of junior faculty. The study examines workplace characteristics and satisfaction levels for junior faculty. The study agrees with the Sigma Xi Postdoc Survey about the the kinds of things that are important for satisfaction: reasonable, well-defined expectations.
The Chronicle and InsideHigherEd both focus on the differences between public and private institutions: people at private institutions are paid more and report modestly higher levels of satisfaction. What I found interesting, however, were the differences between colleges and universities. People at colleges were much more satisfied than those at universities - the gap was more than twice as great as between public and private institutions - and reported better conditions in a range of quality of life areas (see p. 25 of the report). Postdocs in the Sigma Xi survey were interested almost exclusively in large research universities as future workplaces; they might have happier careers if they were to open their minds to other kinds of institutions.
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on Tue, Sep 18, 02:09PM
In the first paragraph, it says, "Early-career faculty at public institutions also expressed greater satisfaction than those at private institutions with work/life balance." That seems like a win for public institutions. I don't know about everyone else, but for me money was not the driving factor for my career choice.
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on Tue, Sep 18, 04:09PM
I agree about non-monetary factors being quite important in career choices - if money were the primary consideration, I'd be at a hedge fund right now.
If you look into the numbers in the original report, you'll see that the differences between public and private institutions are pretty small. Much more interesting to me are the university / college differences, which are a lot bigger than the public/private differences. Universities don't fare so well in a lot of areas.
I spent most of my academic career at Dartmouth. Though technically it's a university (there are a few small graduate programs), it's probably a lot more like the colleges in the study population than the universities. The quality of life there was one of the primary reasons I chose it over university alternatives.
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