International Survey of Research University Faculty: Job Satisfaction

The report examines the feelings of research university faculty about their level of satisfaction with a broad range of factors and attributes of their current jobs: their relationship with students, colleagues, college and departmental administration; their feelings about prospects for advancement, their level of job security and their hopes for the future. The study also provides data on faculty evaluation of highly specific job features such as health benefits, retirement benefits, salaries, the quality of information technology and office space at the university and much more. Faculty comment on what they like most and least about their academic positions, and whether they would do it all over again. The 128-page study presents data from a survey of more than 500 international research university faculty from 50+ universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. Data is broken out by many criteria such as faculty academic title, faculty gender, national location of the university, faculty academic discipline, university public/private status, university enrollment size, faculty teaching load and other useful criteria. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • 69.44% of the survey participants would become an academic all over again if given the choice. • Approximately 80% of survey participants in Canada anticipate being with their current employer after three years whereas 63.14% of participants in the United States, 59.49% of participants in the UK and Ireland, and 49.09% of participants in Australia and New Zealand expect the same. • Participants in colleges ranked in the top 18 worldwide by US News and World Reports were the most likely to be satisfied with prospects for promotions, 67.20%. • Participants specializing in Economics, Business, Finance were the most satisfied (61.54%) while participants specializing in Media and Visual and Performing Arts (34.79%) were the least satisfied group with the outlook for pay increase. Scholars from the following institutions were surveyed for the report: Australian National University, Baylor College of Medicine, Brown University, Carleton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Curtin University, Drexel University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Griffith University, Imperial College London, James Cook University, Massey University, McGill University, Monash University, Penn State University, Queen Mary University of London, Reading University Rice University, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University, Saint Louis University, Swinburne University of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, UConn Health Center, University of California, Davis, University College Dublin, University of Alberta, University of Birmingham, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Idaho, University of Leeds, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Nottingham, University of Reading, University of Tasmania, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Western Australia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington State University and Yale University.