Keeping up with the Joneses: Faculty salary comparison groups for AACSB-accredited schools

Business schools frequently utilize AACSB’s Salary Survey (Staff Compensation and Demographic Survey, or the SCDS Report) to benchmark salaries being offered by other schools. While providing averages based on a national sample, the SCDS Report obscures differences that might exist in salary averages between masters-granting and doctoral-granting business schools. In this paper, we demonstrate how these differences inflate salary averages for masters-granting schools and present a step-by-step methodology that all participating AACSB-accredited schools that provide survey data can deploy to get salary data that are more peer-appropriate and reflective of market expectations.