University Times

Among the 30 full professors in Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business, the average nine-month contract salary was $138,469 as of Oct. 31, 2005.

That’s not counting consultation fees or other non-Pitt compensation that those professors may have received.

During the same period, the 21 technical, skilled and service staff in the Office of Human Resources earned average salaries of $18,408 for 12 months’ work.

Those highs and lows — and everything in between — appear in a recent report by Pitt’s Management Information and Analysis office. The report contains mean (average) and median (the point at which an equal number of employees earn higher and lower salaries) pay for all regular, full-time employees classified as either faculty or staff as of Oct. 31, 2005, the latest complete figures available.

The report, which covers all 45 Pitt responsibility centers, is an in-house companion to a financial disclosure report that the University is required to submit to the state annually. Management Information and Analysis prepared the report at the request of the Senate budget policies committee (BPC), which reviewed it March 2.

Much of the discussion at BPC centered on the usefulness of the report.

“There are a lot of numbers to parse through and make note of,” said BPC chair Stephen Carr. “It’s important to remember that this is just a snapshot of salaries at one point in time, October 2005. These reports individually are blunt instruments of analysis, but they’re still useful in the aggregate. As we move from year to year or from one report to another, some things do stand out.”

For example, Carr said, because the report delineates the job classifications for librarians with the number of employees in each slot, it helps explain the chronic lagging of Pitt’s librarian salaries compared to peers employed at Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions.

In the annual AAU salary report, institutions report librarians as a collective, with one average salary. The report reviewed by BPC lists numbers for librarians I, II, III, IV and V, BPC members noted. Of the 73 faculty-level employees in the University Library System, only three are at level IV and two at level V, while there are 36 at level III and 32 at levels I and II, according to the report.

“One of the issues is what is the demographics of any category. This report breaks that down,” Carr said. “So, while more percentage money has been given to the librarians recently, because there are more lower-division librarians, their average salary as a unit in comparison to peer institutions remains low. This report allows us to trace that from year to year. It’s useful to look at this over time.”

BPC member Philip Wion said the report also is useful for examining the “spread” of salaries within a unit as reflected in the difference between the mean and the median. “Sometimes there’s a fairly large gap between the mean salary and the median salary in a unit, which suggests if the mean is much higher than the median, then there are a few higher paid [individuals],” Wion said. “In units where it’s pretty close, people are making about the same salaries.”

Other observations by BPC members included that:

• Salaries for faculty in the natural sciences division are catching up to those in the social sciences, likely a result of how the centrally allocated salary dollars are being used.

• Humanities division faculty salaries continue to trail significantly their other two division counterparts, maintaining a long-standing condition.

• The phenomenon known as salary compression, where in some cases the average for assistant professors is higher than for associate professors due to job market factors, continues to be evident in select areas, such as in the Katz Graduate School of Business. Business assistant professors made $110,327 on average, compared to $95,572 for associate profs.

• The report is imperfect in certain respects, such as the facts that smaller units show more change from year to year and units are affected by retirements, promotions and recent hires, which mean a fluctuation of salary averages.

According to Robert F. Pack, vice provost for academic planning and resources management, a superior report covering faculty salaries is the one Pitt submits annually to the AAU, and which is published in the March/April issue of Academe. (BPC intends to discuss the AAU report at a future meeting.)

“When you’re talking about faculty salaries, that report, at least, has a clear definition of permanent faculty, and it represents a much more careful name-by-name review of people within our institution,” Pack said. “It eliminates all the volatility of this report.”

In the AAU report, faculty are included only if they spend at least 50 percent of their time in instructional activities, Pack said. “Instruction does not include just classroom instruction, but also post-doc supervision. So we ask units for feedback, who to include and who not to include,” he said.

By contrast, the report reviewed by BPC last week relies on the employee record (ER), which opens the report to certain anomalies, Pack maintained. “For example, you’ll find research professors who are all grant-funded, who will show up on the ER as full time. They’d be eliminated in the Academe report for one or both of two reasons: Either they don’t qualify for the amount of instructional time, or they’re not really full time in the sense of having their full pay from the University.”

He added that the report reviewed by BPC is not particularly useful from the administration’s viewpoint. “It has limited administrative utility because we don’t know who the population is, which varies from year to year so you really can’t tell what the changes mean,” Pack said.

Excluded from the Management Information and Analysis report are salaries of research associates, part-time or temporary employees and faculty on leave of absence without pay.

Academic administrators, including those who also may have a faculty appointment, are included in the data of their respective responsibility center in the category “executive, administrative and managerial,” along with other staff whose classifications fall under this category.

Employees are grouped with the responsibility center that processes their employee record.

To avoid revealing individuals’ pay, the report does not list salary data for employee groups with three or fewer members.

“Salary” as defined by the report includes all contract salaries paid by the University, but not sources of income from outside the University.

Salaries of faculty on 12-month contracts were converted to nine-month (standard academic year) contracts, using the multiplier .818. Staff salaries covered 12 months.

The report gives division-level rather than school-wide salary figures for the School of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

Some highlights of the report include:

• Within A&S, the 13 professors in the dean’s office were, on average, the highest paid group in October 2005, with an average salary of $128,843.

• A&S social sciences division faculty (124 members — average salary $76,260) earned slightly more than their natural sciences counterparts (255 members — $75,122 average), but outpaced humanities division faculty by more than $17,000 (277 members — $59,028 average).

• University-wide, the highest-paid full professors were in the Katz Graduate School of Business (30 members — $138,469 average), followed by the A&S dean’s office (13 members — $128,843 average), the School of Law (25 members — $126,511 average), the Graduate School of Public Health (39 members — $118,148 average), the School of Engineering (48 members — $115,944 average), the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (15 members — $107,854 average) and the School of Medicine (395 members — $107,053 average).

• Among the regional campuses, Johnstown’s 144 faculty members led in average pay ($51,932), followed by Bradford (68 members — $51,105 average), Greensburg (79 members — $49,733 average) and Titusville (22 members — $48,886 average).

• Among staff salaries, the unit with the highest average was the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor (26 staff members — $81,162 average), followed by the Office of the General Counsel (19 staff members — $76,416), the Office of the Secretary of the Board of Trustees (10 staff members — $67,371 average), the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences (48 staff members — $60,244 average), the Department of Athletics (122 staff members — $59,267 average), Computing Services and Systems Development (187 staff members — $56,550 average) and the Office of the Chancellor (236 staff members — $55,018 average).

• Lowest units on the staff salary scale were Education-University Service Programs (five staff members — $22,396 average), followed by Titusville (45 staff members — $26,802 average), the University Library System (116 staff members — $27,715 average), the A&S social sciences division (29 staff members — $28,178 average) and the School of Dental Medicine (143 staff members — $28,276 average).

• Staff in the highest classification (executive, administrative and managerial) were paid the most in the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences (11 staff members — $167,146 average), followed by the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor and Provost (61 staff members — $125,413 average), the School of Medicine Division Administration (26 staff members — $120,031 average), Computing Services and Systems Development (seven staff members — $119,469 average), the Office of the General Counsel (10 staff members — $115,179 average), the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor (16 staff members — $103,410 average), the Office of the Secretary of the Board of Trustees (five staff members — $102,645 average) and the Office of the Chancellor (60 staff members — $102,601 average).

—Peter Hart