About this data

Source

Georgia State's public Banner class-search (GoSOLAR) — a structured JSON feed — cross-referenced with the Open Georgia salary & travel export.

Coverage: FY2015–FY2025 (33 terms); salary FY2015–FY2025.

How it was collected

• Every term's sections are read from the public class-search feed (full instructor name, meeting times with weekly hours, enrollment, cross-list group, schedule type, campus).
• Instructors are linked to Open Georgia salary by full name using a tiered accept / review / reject scorer; only confident matches are kept.
• Data was fetched politely at roughly one request per ten seconds to respect the university's systems.
• Cross-listed / co-scheduled sections sharing a group are collapsed to one event so a class is never counted twice.

Accuracy & instructor linking

• About 91.6% of sections carry a linked instructor, and roughly 71% of distinct instructor names link to a salary record — the strongest linkage of the institutions covered, thanks to full names.
• Unlinked names are mostly adjuncts, graduate instructors, or staff absent from the salary export, not mismatches.
• The feed's per-section instructor id is term-scoped and reused, so identity is resolved by name, not that id.

Limitations

• The feed provides a subject but no department or college, so the subject is used as the department; a college is shown only for subjects that map unambiguously to one professional school (GSU's 2016 merger with Georgia Perimeter College makes a full subject→college crosswalk ambiguous).
• Salary is attributed to the subject(s) a person taught in each fiscal year — teaching-faculty pay, not a unit's full payroll.
• Names of lower-paid individuals may be obfuscated depending on the admin salary threshold; salary figures remain visible.
• Two different people with the same full name cannot be told apart and may be merged.