This is an interesting statistic that Chris Rickert dug up.

Obviously, more full professors means more people in line for full-professor salaries and greater pressure on the budget for professorial salaries overall. At UW-Madison, that’s no small detail, as about 59 percent of UW-Madison professors have attained full status, according to the university’s Data Digest.

By contrast, figures from the American Association of University Professors show that, on average, only about 31.5 percent profs at all universities and about 30.8 percent at public universities are full professors.

UW-Madison is also ahead of most of its peer institutions. Of the seven I was able to get usable data from, only the University of California at Los Angeles appeared to have a higher percentage of full professors — about 69 percent of full-time equivalent faculty. The others ranged from 33 percent to 54 percent.