What is "payscale"

n. A pay grade.

PayScale, Inc. or payscale.com is an online salary, benefits and compensation information company, which launched its service on January 1, 2002. It was founded by Joe Giordano, a former Microsoft and drugstore.com manager, and John Gaffney. On April 24, 2014 Warburg Pincus invested up to $100,000,000 in PayScale for a majority ownership stake in the company.

PayScale was developed to help people obtain accurate real-time information on job market compensation. The service works via the Internet by enabling individual employees to submit their job profile and salary data, which is then compared to others. The company states that it is able to use the volume of information statistically to determine accurate real-time salary information.

The company generates revenue by selling aggregate data and web services to employers, to aid in determining correct market rates for hiring, benchmarking and budgeting, and by targeted advertising to employees that visit its web site.

The company has published rankings of U.S. universities based on "return on investment," or the purported difference between student expenditures for a university degree and the money they earn from it. These rankings are dramatically different from better-known rankings published by U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, The Economist, and other mainstream publications (for instance, PayScale places Yale University 93rd among American universities and Georgetown University 132nd). The Chronicle of Higher Education has criticized PayScale for using misleading sample sizes and for omitting all alumni of universities who go on to grad school from its count.