In May 2012 Maclean’s magazine published an article comparing median faculty salaries at Canadian universities for 2010/2011. The data were provided by Statistics Canada’s Centre for Education Statistics through the University and College Academic Staff Survey. According to the report, the University of Toronto paid the highest salaries in Canada. No surprise there. Second and third place, respectively, went to Queen’s University and McMaster University.
What may have surprised some members is that UBC ranked 19th, below much smaller universities such as Brock, Trent and Windsor. Breaking the results down by rank (which Maclean’s did not do) proves interesting. UBC ranks 17th and 10th in salaries at the Full Professor and Assistant Professor ranks, respectively, but 22nd at the Associate Professor rank.
Of course these data are now one year out of date. Given that almost all the top universities in Canada received significantly higher salary settlements last year than we did (and none received lower), we can expect our salary rankings will have fallen since last year.
UBC faculty members have made UBC one of the best universities in the world. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks UBC as the second-best university in Canada (30th best in the world) after the University of Toronto (ranked 21st best in the world). The only other Canadian universities in the top 100 are McGill (34th) and Montreal (84th). These rankings are far from precise, but we do agree that UBC and the University of Toronto are the top two universities in Canada.
While we would prefer to be the number one university in Canada in both academic and salary rankings, if we are the number two university in terms of academics, we should also be number two in terms of salary.
