From Bill Mohler: Don't base big decisions on iffy statistics.

I warn undecided voters (like me) against wrongly accepting some of the arguments of the most recent UCHC-AAUP email/posting. Specifically, proceed with caution when you compare your own salary against the averages posted at the linked AAMC website. The UCHC-AAUP argument depends on on a clever ploy to play hard statistical comparisons of group averages against more emotion-gripping individual comparisons of oneself against an average. Below is the basic problem, one we should all recall from our elementary education on statistics:

The comparisons between Storrs and national averages are comparisons of means against means; figures are derived from the same formulas and do not need to consider the position of individuals within a distribution or how the distribution is shaped..

In contrast, the subsequent exhortation to compare one's own salary to a national average for med school faculty misleadingly proposes an implicit vote-generating comparison of MEDIAN value (salaries of the 50+% of UCHC faculty needed to vote in the union) to the MEAN for national faculty. The distribution of faculty salaries at UCHC is certainly not a normal distribution, but rather a one-tailed distribution from a commonly paid base salary to higher ranges for outliers

For this reason, the median MUST be significantly lower than the mean salary.
If we each heed UCHC-AAUP's advice and make the individual-to-mean comparison, then many more than 1/2 of us will be disappointed by finding our own salary below the mean (EVEN the mean for UCHC itself)!!!. If we let that disappointment guide our votes, we will surely vote in a Union, but without any hope of that statistical disappointment being satisfied.

WHY? Because even if the Union delivered on its implicit promise to perform the wonders that it has at Storrs (all mean-to-mean tests, remember), a majority of us would STILL fail the individual-to-mean test on which we based our Vote!
In fact, a majority of current Storrs faculty would be disappointed if they took the same test today!

[Please also keep in mind the following: Tenure and promotion are awarded more rapidly (5 years) at UCHC than at many med schools. The result is that faculty with less years of experience (and fewer annual cost/merit increases) occupy each of the rank categories at UCHC than at other AAMC schools.]

Don't take the bait. Vote based on facts and not gut-twisting or manipulated statistics.

--
William A. Mohler

Associate Professor
Dept. of Genetics and Developmental Biology

wmohler@neuron.uchc.edu
Mobile: (860) 985-2719

P Think before you print