Turner College Alum Publishes Academic Study

A new academic study by Turner College alum Julissa Santoyo explores the possibility of gender discrimination in higher education wages using data on deans’ salaries from more than 200 colleges and schools of business in the U.S.  The study, set for publication in a forthcoming issue of Frontiers in Education, extends prior research suggesting that if an applicant for business school dean is female, and if the previous business school dean’s salary is important, then the applicant is able to circumvent wage discrimination given that the salaries of public university officials are publicly available.  Econometric results presented in the study indicate that although the earnings of male deans exceed those of their female counterparts, nearly all of the difference is attributed to the fact that male deans possess highly-valued characteristics, such as experience, tenure, scholarship and others, in abundance relative to female deans.  The remaining difference between the earnings of male and female deans is found to be statistically insignificant, thus supporting prior research.  This new publication is co-authored with Turner College professor of economics, Frank Mixon, and his research colleagues from Florida Atlantic University, Steve Caudill and João Faria.  As reported in a prior Turner Business entry, Santoyo is a credit risk manager at Synovus in Atlanta.  She graduated Suma Cum Laude from the Turner College in 2019, where, as an undergraduate, she worked in the business tutoring lab and served as president of the finance club.  Lastly, this new publication is Santoyo’s second.  She also co-authored a related study with Mixon, Faria and Daniel Gropper of Florida Atlantic University that appears in a 2019 issue of Managerial and Decision Economics.