Evaluating the quality of American universities: A new approach

Considerable effort has been devoted to developing systematic rankings of the quality of American univerities. Some approaches focus on the assessments of knowledgeable individuals. Other approaches necessitate the accumulation of considerable data and the construction of some composite measure. The present article argues that researchers should devote more attention to faculty salary data. Utilizing the quartile deviation as a measure of institutional quality, the authors ranked the 138 major universities designated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as Class I institutions. Because the authors' results were not strikingly different from other ranking systems and because salary data are readily available, the authors argue that studies of faculty salaries hold great promise as measures of institutional quality.