University Times

A comparison of faculty salaries at the Pittsburgh campus with salaries at 33 other public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions showed that full professors’ pay held steady at No. 13, unchanged from last year’s comparison.

Associate professors saw their comparative pay slip three places in the rankings to No. 15 and assistant professors dropped seven places to No. 20.

Librarians were the only group to see a gain in the comparative rankings, moving up six notches, according to an annual analysis released last week by Pitt’s Office of Institutional Research.

Although salaries of full professors at the Pittsburgh campus rose an average of 3.1 percent to $113,200, they remained unchanged in the rankings. Topping the public peer group list was the University of California-Los Angeles with an average salary of $128,400. At the bottom was the University of Oregon with an average of $88,000.

Associate professors earned an average of $75,500 at the Pittsburgh campus, a 2 percent increase from a year ago. But in the rankings their pay level fell from No. 12 a year ago to No. 15 in the current comparison. The survey found the highest paid associate professors in the public AAU schools at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with $83,700. Ranking last was the University of Oregon with $63,100.

While Pitt’s assistant professors at the Pittsburgh campus earned an average of $64,600, up 1.6 percent from last year, their ranking fell seven places to No. 20 among the 34 public AAU schools, down from No. 13 last year. Their colleagues at the University of Maryland-College Park earned $75,900 to top the peer group. The University of Missouri-Columbia was at the bottom of the group with average pay of $55,700.

Librarians at the Pittsburgh campus ranked No. 20 in the peer comparisons, up six places from No. 26 a year ago. They earned an average of $59,400, a pay increase of 6.1 percent over last year. Those at University of California-Berkeley ranked No. 1 with an average pay of $74,800, while librarians at the University of Missouri-Columbia were at the bottom of the list with $51,900.

The librarians’ climb in the rankings was greeted with enthusiasm by members of the University Senate budget policies committee (BPC) who received the report in a May 19 meeting.

“The good news is that librarians are moving up. They were at the bottom a few years ago,” said committee member Phil Wion.

Robert Pack, vice provost, academic planning and resources management, said the result can be attributed to an effort by the provost to use differential spending to buoy librarians’ salaries.

The group rose from No. 30 in fiscal 2002 to No. 22 in fiscal 2004, then dipped to No. 26 a year ago before rising to the current No. 20.

In the current survey, salaries for all four Pitt faculty groups surveyed were in the second quintile of the peer group, meaning that the average pay ranged between the 60th to 79.9th percentile in the survey.

Data for the survey was gleaned from information published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the March-April 2006 issue of Academe. Librarian salaries are taken from the Association of Research Librarians 2005-06 annual salary survey.

And, while numbers don’t lie, members of the administration and the BPC caution that there’s more to the figures than initially may meet the eye. They say that while comparisons are a tool that can be used to measure change over time, they are subject to many changeable factors from year to year.

While the average increase for faculty who remained in the same rank as in the prior year was consistent with history, Pack said the change in the makeup of the faculty ranks affected the University’s percentage increases this year. The changed mix at Pitt — including an overall increase in the number of assistant professors — was a result of a combination of retirements, promotions and new hiring, driven in part by replacement hiring as a result of retirements, and not attributable to any one factor. In addition, a large number of new hires that increased the overall number of assistant professors combined with a significant number of promotions lowered the average pay for that rank at Pitt.

“A lot of the reports we get have false concreteness of numbers,” said BPC chairman Stephen Carr. “You think that you know something just by reading the list of numbers, but the numbers do need to be interpreted.” Calling the report “a blunt instrument,” Carr said it is “useful for comparative purposes. Although you can’t make simple comparisons, presumably other institutions are undergoing similar kinds of activity and in the long run it will all come out in the wash.

“No individual analysis is gospel, but over time, we want to be moving up or staying the same and not falling,” he said.

The Pitt figures in the survey are taken from October faculty rosters each year. Because faculty numbers are constantly in flux, a strict year-to-year comparison can’t be drawn.

“If our percentages don’t change from year to year about how many people are new, continuing, et cetera, then the numbers make sense,” said Pack. But that tends not to hold when hiring is outpacing retirements. “The snapshot is only useful if the group remains consistent.

“What we’re seeing happen is hiring is essentially being ramped up, particularly at the assistant professor level,” said Pack. “In numbers, we’re seeing more faculty being hired as assistant professors. And obviously the hiring tends to be at a lower salary than the average of people already in that rank. And if you get a significantly large number of people being promoted to the next rank, that obviously has two effects. It lowers both ranks.”

Looking at the assistant professor salaries, Pack said the survey is especially sensitive to changes in the composition of the group.

“It isn’t the salaries of the same people, it is simply the salaries of all assistant professors in two different years, so if the group changes in a substantial way the average is affected,” he said.

“For instance, in assistant professors we had 361 continuing assistant professors from October 2004 to October 2005. Those 361 faculty had average salary increases of 4.3 percent. We had 102 new faculty hired. They were hired at a salary $4,000 less on average than the rank, and at a salary that was over $5,000 less than that of continuing faculty. So that’s a significantly larger number of assistant professors than we usually hire,” Pack said in explanation of how an influx of lower-paid new hires affects the numbers.

“And, we had 43 assistant professors promoted out … and the salaries they had the year before were over $7,000 higher than the (assistant professor) group,” he said.

The 361 continuing assistants were among 472 assistant professors at Pitt, according to the AAUP survey. After accounting for hiring and departures, including those who were promoted out of the group or left the University, Pitt’s assistant professor rank ended up with a net gain of 22 people over the prior year.

“This was a group where the average really disguises a significant change in the composition of the group,” Pack said.

“To a lesser extent, the same thing happened with associate professors,” Pack continued. “The 358 continuing associate professors [out of 413 reported in the AAUP survey] received an average salary increase of 3.1 percent. The new ones were about $9,000 less than that. And those that were promoted out had salaries a year earlier about $12,000 higher than the average.

“The rank where there was the most stability was in the professor rank and there the average increase for continuing professors was 3.7 percent and the average increase for the rank was 3.1 percent,” Pack said. The AAUP survey listed 486 full professors at Pitt; of them, 452 were continuing faculty.

“So, the average salary increase for continuing faculty is consistent with what it has been in previous years. What has changed is the mix within the rank and that was most pronounced at the assistant professor level,” Pack said.

Another factor that affects the figures is where the hiring is being done. “If you have more hires in Arts and Sciences than in the professional schools, and a lot of these faculty were in Arts and Sciences, the salaries tend to be lower. If you have more hiring in the humanities and social sciences, the salaries tend to be lower,” Pack said.

“So this was an intriguing year and one that created great puzzlement because we knew we spent the money, we knew how much we spent and then we had these numbers for increases for continuing faculty that were consistent with what they had been historically. So trying to determine how did the groups change led to this kind of analysis,” Pack said.

—Kimberly K. Barlow