San Francisco publishes one dollar as the faculty median and the ceiling

A dean saw $357,220 on the San Francisco row for health specialties teachers and treated it as a bad cell. The national median is $107,310. The local figure is more than three times that, and the table then repeats it as the upper quarter. That repetition is the briefing. There is no published rung above the median to aim at.

The lower quarter is $167,790. That floor already clears the country by a wide margin. OEWS counts 4,340 people in the occupation in the metro, and the local share is deeper than a typical city. You are not recruiting in an empty faculty market. You are recruiting in one where the ordinary published wage would look like an error on a national spreadsheet.

The work is teaching health professions students, in a classroom and beside them in clinic. People who do it know what a Bay Area faculty line pays. A posting that opens on the national median, or on a hopeful number halfway between the country and San Francisco, reads as a different institution.

What the repeated dollar means

When the median and the upper quarter are the same published figure, you do not have a top of the band to negotiate toward. BLS is not showing you a separate ceiling. The honest offers inside this row are the lower quarter, for a load the school will still be shaping, and the median, for someone who already carries a full teaching assignment. Inventing a third number above $357,220 is fan fiction. The table stopped.

Little Rock is the contrast that keeps a system from smoothing this away. The median there is $214,790, with 1,560 faculty and a much deeper local share. Its upper quarter is $394,880, which is above the dollar San Francisco publishes as both midpoint and top. Those are two markets. Averaging them produces a wage nobody in either city is paid, and both searches will come back labeled as shortages.

A national faculty band has the same flaw at a larger scale. It will look generous next to $107,310 and still sit under people already teaching in San Francisco. Cost-of-living language doesn't repair that. Candidates compare the line with the line, not with a speech about rent.

What to put on the intake

Write the lower quarter and the median on the approval and circle one. If the load is a new course plus clinical supervision you will still be building, say that, and stop pretending the unpublished top of the market is in the budget. If you need someone who already runs a full student panel, the median is the number you have to be able to say out loud. Match rank and credentials to the circle. A terminal degree the program will sponsor is a plan, not a gate that only the top of an invisible band could clear.

Say whether the year includes a summer term. Faculty compare calendars as hard as they compare base, and a nine-month line and a twelve-month line are different jobs wearing one title.

Illustrative story

The comp committee parked the San Francisco figure in a footnote and built the range from the national median, plus a small bump so it wouldn't look careless. Applicants who already taught in the city declined without a counter. One of them said the lower quarter at a program across the bay was the comparison, and the posted band never reached it.

The dean told the search committee the number had to be wrong because it matched the upper quarter. That match is what the table printed. They rewrote the offer at the local median, took a credential the program was willing to support off the required list, and put the calendar in the first paragraph. The next conversations were about load, not about whether the school had opened its own row.

If the median and the ceiling are the same published dollar, stop shopping for a rung above it.

https://reqradius.com/hiring/health-specialties-teachers-postsecondary-san-francisco-ca/

Sources

• BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
• ReqRadius hiring page for San Francisco