On professional salaries

The determinant of the salary that a man is paid for his services can involve many factors, both naturally and artificially evolved. The evaluation of a man´s monetary value is particularly complex in the case of technical professionals whose product cannot easily be judged by clear-cut measures such as amount of sales made or runs batted in. In this article, data from a group of job applications from almost 30 establishments and from the results of a random sampling of faculties of more than 500 colleges and universities are analyzed. As a result, a number of biographical characteristics are identified that, on the average, affect salary levels of such professionals. In addition, a method is demonstrated for weighting the factors involved and presenting the results in a more comprehensive manner than that employed in existing salary surveys.