University Times

Salary benchmarking lists at Pitt’s regional campuses have been a point of contention in the past, but that may be changing.

Last year, at the request of faculty presidents at the Bradford, Greensburg and Johnstown campuses, the Provost’s office forwarded as a salary benchmark comparison a list of 270 four-year baccalaureate institutions from three large geographic regions of the United States.

While reactions on the regional campuses were mixed as to the usefulness of such a large list, one concern was that the list was unwieldy.

(See University Times April 28, 2005.)

Last week, the Johnstown campus Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve a report by an ad hoc committee recommending a common faculty salary benchmark list for Pitt’s three primarily four-year regional campuses.

The committee, which included faculty representatives from Bradford, Greensburg and Johnstown, was charged last October by UPJ faculty president Richard Ulsh “to start from scratch, to be unbiased, to keep an open mind about all possible lists, to objectively develop a set of appropriate criteria, not to ‘cherry-pick’ schools to inflate numbers and to let ‘the chips fall where they may’ — all of which they did,” Ulsh said.

Ulsh said he was very pleased with the report of the committee that recommended a peer comparison group of 22 institutions from across the country.

“The report was clear, the methodology was sound, the list is a workable number of institutions, the list got a fair airing and the process was democratic and transparent, which I’m very sensitive to,” Ulsh said.

“But I want to make it clear that this is not in any sense my report, and that I cannot speak for any other campus,” he said. “I told the Faculty Senate and the presidents of the faculty at Bradford and Greensburg that now we are at a crossroads in that it was up to each campus to follow its own procedures to evaluate this list.”

Ulsh noted that the faculty senates at UPB and UPG have had their final meetings of the academic year and likely will not be discussing the list until the fall.

Ulsh forwarded the UPJ Faculty Senate’s recommendation to his campus’s administration following the April 19 Faculty Senate meeting.

Jerry Samples, vice president for academic and student affairs at UPJ, said that he and campus President Albert Etheridge plan to review the proposed list for use as a benchmark in future academic planning. He stopped short of saying the list was approved as the campus’s salary benchmark.

“The list is a good effort to establish a benchmark, and the committee did a good job to be fair and balanced. It is something we will seriously consider as a target group for salary comparisons,” Samples said.

“We’ve already submitted our annual strategic plan to the provost for this year,” he continued. “But we could amend it at this point, and take [the list] into consideration during the allocation of funds for the upcoming [fiscal] year. Or we might choose to work this list into next year’s plan as a target benchmark for salary allocations. In any case, this will certainly be part of our future, when our [budgeting and planning] committee does its work next year.”

Allan Walstad, a UPJ faculty member who helped prepare the committee report, explained the committee’s methodology.

Under the Carnegie Classification system for higher education, UPB and UPG are in the “baccalaureate-general” category and UPJ is in the “baccalaureate-liberal arts” category. The committee combined those two categories initially, Walstad said. The other criteria included four-year, publicly funded, degree-granting institutions from all 50 states.

“The committee agreed that the U.S. Department of Education’s IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) database was the most valid and reliable source of information for our purposes,” he said.

IPEDS data are generated from survey information that includes describing the function of faculty in percentage breakdowns in a number of categories, including “primarily combined instruction/research/service,” “primarily instruction” and “primarily research.”

Pitt’s regionals reported relatively high percentages of faculty whose primary function is in the combined instruction/research/service category: 50 percent (UPB), 64 percent (UPJ), 65 percent (UPG); however, the preliminary lists the committee generated provided a large number of institutions reporting zero or near zero percentage of faculty in that category.

So the committee added as a criterion only those institutions that self-described faculty activities in the combined instruction/research/service category at a minimum of 10 percent.

That analysis yielded a list of only 11 peer institutions, “too small a number to be comfortable with,” Walstad explained.

The committee then enlarged the sample to include institutions in the Carnegie Classification system directly above (“master’s colleges and universities II”) and below (“baccalaureate/associates”) the two classifications of Pitt’s regionals.

“Four of the master’s II institutions and seven of the bachelor’s/ associates met our 10 percent combined IRS criterion, and we recommended that they be included in the peer comparison group,” Walstad said.

Including master’s II category schools might look suspicious, Walstad acknowledged. “But the committee’s response to that is that salaries at the four schools included are not out of line with the rest of the group, and that several of the schools in the Carnegie baccalaureate categories also confer a significant number of master’s degrees,” he pointed out.

“While the results show the Pitt regionals to be somewhat below the benchmarking averages, the data do not appear to show us as being grossly underpaid. It was not our purpose as a committee to lobby for higher salaries,” Walstad said.

—Peter Hart