The Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning serves as the governing board overseeing the eight public universities in Mississippi, including the University of Mississippi Medical Center located in Jackson. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is the accrediting body for each of the public universities in Mississippi.…

The rising price of a year in college looms large on the American political landscape. Calls to make college free, or at least debt free, will figure prominently in policy and political debates going forward. To make sense of this debate, an understanding of the forces that have been driving the price of a year in postsecondary education upward…

The private higher education sector in developing countries is challenged with high turnover, which has resulted in lowered sustainable competitive advantage. The resource-based theory considers strategic resources as a vital source to achieve a competitive advantage among its competitors. We argue that staff retention is a key factor to address…

The Faculty in Higher Education Survey collects data from approximately 853 higher education institutions on over 270,000 full-time faculty (tenure track and non-tenure track), as well as academic department heads and adjunct (pay-per-course) faculty. Data collected for full-time faculty include: salary, supplemental salary, and course relief (for…

Increasingly, scholars in academia as well as journalists are noting vast pay discrepancies among professorial ranks. This study is an attempt to examine how gender, rank, and scholarly output influence faculty members' income from their institutions. Using equity theory as a conceptual framework, the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty…

Pay compression and inversion are significant problems for many organizations and are often severe in schools of business in particular. At the same time, there is more insistence on showing accountability and paying employees based on performance. The authors explain and show a detailed example of how to use a Compensation Equity/ Performance…

This framework provides a set of recommendations for postsecondary institutions and employers to support Black learners and workers to build professional social capital. It expands on a related JFF market scan that maps the landscape of nonprofit and social enterprise-led social capital initiatives.

Abstract The academic profession is internally divided as never before. This cross-national comparative analysis of stratification in Higher Education is based on a sample of European academic scientists (N = 8,466) from universities in 11 countries. The analysis identifies three types of stratification: academic performance stratification,…

The population of the United States is getting older. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), older workers -- which the BLS defines as those who are 55 and older -- made up 22% of the U.S. workforce in 2016, nearly double the 12% recorded in 1995. This increase is largely "fueled by the aging baby-boom generation, a large…

ACTA's 12th state higher education report examines questions of great urgency for the state of Mississippi: How should individual public universities choose their leadership? Are the public universities careful stewards of taxpayer dollars? Is free speech protected on Mississippi's college campuses? The report assesses institutions on measures of…

The private return to postsecondary investment varies widely by field, but the resources required by different fields are not well known. This paper establishes five new facts about college costs using novel department-level data. First, costs vary widely across field, ranging from electrical engineering (109 percent higher costs than English) to…

The Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) is an inflation index designed specifically for use by institutions of higher education. Compiled from data reported by government agencies and industry sources, HEPI measures the average relative level in the price of a fixed market basket of goods and services purchased by colleges and universities each…

Psychology remains one of the more popular undergraduate majors in higher education. A sizable number of psychology faculty complement this discipline's popularity as a major. Overall, psychology faculty make up about 5% of the total faculty population. In this brief, we provide a snapshot of psychology faculty data: how their salaries compare to…

Can an academic institution be truly free if it relies on government funding? Federal dollars mean federal mandates, and those mandates grow increasingly draconian. More and more, they stifle debate on open questions, demand denial of verifiable scientific truths, eliminate due process for students accused of misdeeds by other students, or insist…

Gender inequalities in salary, rank and access to leadership positions characterize institutions of higher education and disadvantage women faculty. Differential exposure to noxious working conditions and restricted access to social resources may underlie these inequalities by detracting from women faculty's well-being, thereby perpetuating the…