CyChecks: Obtains and Analyzes Iowa State University Salary Data

CyChecks is an examination of the pay patterns across Iowa State University. While this salary data is publicly available through the Iowa government website, it is not formatted in such a way as to allow users to compare pay trends between genders. We've created CyChecks and the Shiny App to allow users to more easily visualize this dataset. We feel this dataset could be especially helpful to those looking for university jobs, who might not know what the typical salary range is and therefore how to negogiate an offer.

Problem Areas

While we strongly believe that CyChecks is allowing users to accurately interact with publicly available salary information, but there are a couple issues that we'd like to be completely transparant about.

Department information is not included in the original, publicly available data file. Iowa State Human Resources gave us a list of all faculty and staff and their affiliated departments as of January 1st 2019, however our dataset begins in 2007, therefore if a faculty or staff member left before 2019 then are not included in our Shiny App. To correct for this problem we have manually entered professor information, using faculty directories published by Iowa State each year. However, there are still cases in which a faculty member is not listed in the directory and their department affiliation is not readily identifiable. Unfortunately those cases continue to be left out of our Shiny App. We realize this method is non-reproducible, however it's the best methodology that we see at this time. If Iowa State University decides to publicly release directory information, we will make that publicly available.
All of our salary estimates are based upon the "total salary paid" for a given fiscal year. This is because total salary paid is always reported for all employees. However, this is not the same thing as the "base salary" for an employee. For instance, some professors are paid on 9-month appointments but will supplement their summer income with grant money. While their base salary may not change from year to year, their total salary paid can fluctuate, depending on grant funding availability.