Why, by blog hits of course!

Q.

How should a college professor’s talent/value be calculated and quantified? Which metrics would you use? Do you bring these things up at your annual review? – Lenny

A.

What a delicious question! I believe this was something that the Texas A&M system has been trying to do, and Daniel Hamermesh was critical of the measurements that the system was using to value professors. If you pick the wrong performance metrics, then you’re going to produce incentives that cause professors to pursue sub-optimal activities. For baseball teams, it’s fairly simple to assume that team owners are profit maximizers, so identifying qualities that lead to winning, which increases revenue, are easy to identify. In academia, what is it that universities are trying to maximize? Prestige, donations, spreading knowledge, etc.? And in many cases, it’s hard to quantify exactly what professors are bringing to a university quickly. What if a professor spends years researching innovative methods that revolutionize his/her discipline. He/she might receive some grants and prizes along the way, but down the road that professor may produce many wealthy alumni who give back generously many years after graduation, possibly after the professor has already died. Capturing this value is difficult.

Annual reviews do include metrics such as publications (quantity and quality), teaching evaluations, direct service contributions, etc. Some schools have very detailed criteria (for example, a publication in American Economic Review is worth a 3 percent raise), while some schools have subjective evaluations by department chairs and deans who decide how much to allocate out of a pool of funds based on performance. Even though the criteria are not always explicit, department chairs have an incentive to keep good faculty in place, and therefore reward faculty who do things that cause them to get hired away. Good teaching may be important, but it’s hard to signal to outside institutions. So, a professor who is publishing in top journals will likely get better raises. And ultimately, everyone knows that the best way to get a raise in academia is to shop yourself on the market and get an outside offer. The downside of allowing the collective wisdom of the outside market to fully govern compensation is that faculty devote resources to applying for jobs at the expense of devoting more resources internally.

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com