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May 17, 2007

Faculty pay at Pitt compared with AAU publics

An annual 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 moved up one spot to No. 12 from last year.

Associate professors saw their comparative pay stay unchanged in the ranking at No. 15 and assistant professors dropped four places to No. 24.

Librarians’ comparative pay rose two notches to tie for No. 18 with the University of Maryland-College Park, according to an annual analysis released May 4 by Pitt’s Management Information and Analysis group.

Salaries of full professors at the Pittsburgh campus rose an average of 5.6 percent to $119,500. Topping the public peer group list was the University of California-Los Angeles with an average salary of $133,200 (up 3.7 percent from the previous year).

At the bottom was the University of Oregon with an average of $88,300 (a hike of 0.4 percent from last year’s data).

Associate professors earned an average of $78,200 (3.5 percent average increase) at the Pittsburgh campus. The survey found the highest paid associate professors in the public AAU schools at the University of Virginia with $87,700, a 6.1 percent average increase. Ranking last was the University of Oregon with $62,100, an average decrease of 1.6 percent.

Assistant professors at the Pittsburgh campus earned an average of $66,400, up 2.7 percent from last year. Their colleagues at the University of Maryland-College Park earned $77,400 (a 2 percent average increase) to top the peer group. The University of Missouri-Columbia was at the bottom of the assistant professor group with average pay of $56,600, a 1.6 percent average increase.

Librarians at the Pittsburgh campus earned an average of $61,700, a pay increase of 3.9 percent over last year. Those at Rutgers University-New Brunswick ranked No. 1 with an average pay of $77,300 (up 7.8 percent), while librarians at the University of Oregon were at the bottom of the list with $51,500 (a decrease of 5.6 percent over last year).

Data for the survey were derived from information published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the March-April 2007 issue of Academe. Librarian salaries are taken from the Association of Research Librarians 2006-07 annual salary survey.

The Pitt figures in the survey are taken from October faculty rosters each year. Data are for full-time instructional faculty as defined by the AAUP, that is those faculty whose assignment is at least 50 percent instruction, including the supervision of postdocs and research deemed part of the normal instructional process. Faculty on leave are counted at their regular salaries, even if they are receiving a reduced salary while on leave. Visiting faculty also are included if they are replacing a faculty member who is not included.

No clinical faculty are included, but medical school faculty — about 110 in all — from the five basic sciences departments are included. Deans and other administrators, even those with faculty appointments, are not included.

Salaries are converted to a standard nine-month academic year for faculty members with a 12-month salary. Librarians’ salaries are reported on a 12-month basis.

The analysis is prepared annually at the request of the University Senate budget policies committee, which tracks trends in Pitt’s faculty salaries.

BPC members asked if there were particular reasons that the Pitt ranking at the assistant professor level had dropped four places in this year’s comparison.

Robert Pack, vice provost for academic planning and resources management, said that a year-to-year comparison is affected by the changing composition of that group especially.

“The number of professors and associate professors remains fairly constant in gross numbers. It’s been a fairly stable number, and a high percentage of those ranks are continuing faculty,” Pack said. “So, you’re looking at more of the same group. But in the last four years, the number of assistant professors has gone up 17 percent and that’s been accelerating each year. There are a lot more assistants than there used to be and that group is in flux — if they’re promoted, for example.”

BPC members agreed that while comparisons are a tool that can be used to measure change over time, they are subject to many variable factors from year to year, including retirements, promotions, new hiring and faculty resignations.

In addition, Pack said, the numbers can be skewed from year to year based on where the University is hiring. Hiring in the humanities, for example, typically means lower starting salaries.

“There was a lot of change in Arts and Sciences, a fairly significant infusion of new positions, including 21 new tenure-track positions,” Pack pointed out.

Pitt tracks salaries not only by rank but by discipline, he said.

“The purpose of that is so deans know what is the average starting salary in physics or in engineering and so forth.” At a time of limited resources, “the principle of equity has to be related to your objective,” Pack said. “If the object is to be a top 10 program in the country, your salaries are going to be much higher than the average in that discipline. But if your goal is, for example, to offer a strong regional undergraduate program, then the salary competitive gap is very different. When you get down to the department level, you ask: ‘Where is your department now? Where should it be? What are its competitive strengths and so forth?’”

At that point the provost’s discretionary salary fund, also called faculty initiatives, comes into play, he added.

BPC chair Stephen Carr commented, “From everything I can see, we’re continuing to make progress in a slow but steady upturn over time of salaries compared to our peers. We should commend the administration for their work toward that goal.”

BPC also heard a report, based on the AAUP salary data, on Pitt’s four regional campuses.

The analysis compared faculty salaries at the Bradford, Greensburg and Johnstown campuses within a peer group of branch campuses at 18 category IIB AAU public schools. The smaller Titusville campus was compared in a group of three Category III AAU public branches.

Category IIB schools are characterized by an emphasis on undergraduate baccalaureate-level education as opposed to graduate degrees. Category III schools are defined as those who confer at least three-quarters of their degrees or awards at levels below a bachelor’s degree and who use academic ranks to categorize faculty.

Salaries at Pitt’s regional campuses put them in the lower half of the list in comparison with regional/branch campus faculty at similar institutions.

According to Vice Provost Pack, there are two things to note about the change from last year in the composition of faculty at Pitt’s four-year regionals. “The number of professors dropped by 21 percent due to retirements, and the number of assistant professors is up by 10 percent. They have a much younger faculty,” suggesting overall lower salaries, Pack told BPC May 4.

Professors’ salaries

Pitt’s five professors at UPG ranked No. 10 with an average salary of $76,600. Last year, UPG had eight professors and the campus was ranked No. 15.

The 16 professors at UPJ ranked No. 15 (No. 17 last year), earning $67,100, and UPB’s nine professors earned an average of $66,200, No. 16 on the list of 18 public peer schools. UPB ranked last on last year’s list.

Penn State’s IIB campuses, which are reported as a group, topped the salary comparison again this year with an average salary of $93,600 for the 56 professors listed.

The group average, excluding Pitt’s campuses, was $82,700.

The average salary of Pitt-Titusville and the University of Wisconsin Colleges professors was not reported in the AAUP survey because there were fewer than three individuals at the rank at those institutions.

Associate professors

The 22 associate professors at Pitt-Greensburg tied for No. 11 with the University of North Carolina-Asheville with an average pay of $59,500. UPG ranked 16th last year.

Pitt-Johnstown’s 58 associate professors ranked No. 13 (No. 14 last year) with an average pay of $59,000, while Pitt-Bradford’s 23 associate professors ranked No. 14 (No. 12 last year) with an average salary of $57,700.

Topping the rank again this year were Penn State’s IIB campuses with an average salary of $71,700 for their 149 associate professors. At the bottom was Purdue University-North Central at $57,000. The group average, excluding Pitt, was $64,200.

Pitt-Titusville ranked second of the three schools in the Category III comparison with its eight associate professors earning an average of $51,000. Associates at Penn State’s Category III campuses again led the group with an average of $68,200; salary data for the University of Wisconsin Colleges were not reported because there were fewer than three individuals at the rank at that institution. The group average, excluding Pitt, was $68,200.

Assistant professors

Pitt-Greensburg’s 33 assistant professors earned an average of $48,000 to place No. 12 (No. 13 last year) among the IIB peer group, followed by Pitt-Bradford’s 31 assistant professors who earned an average of $47,600, tied at No. 14 (same as last year) with Purdue University-North Central.

Lower in the rankings at No. 16 (the same as last year) were Pitt-Johnstown’s 43 assistant professors, who earned an average of $46,600. The group average, excluding Pitt, was $54,600.

Pitt-Titusville’s nine assistant professors ranked No. 2 among the Category III group with an average salary of $46,500. Penn State’s category III campuses led the group with an average of $61,900, while data for the University of Wisconsin Colleges were not reported. The group average, excluding Pitt, was $61,900.

At the BPC meeting, Pack was asked about the status of alternative regional campus salary benchmarking groups that have been floated in the past couple years. (See University Times May 25, 2006.)

“We have two new presidents coming in [at Greensburg and Johnstown]. The first thing we’ll stress is that you can’t look at Greensburg, Bradford and Johnstown campuses as separate,” Pack said. “When we have fairly small numbers — like under 100 — it’s too volatile. You can get very wide swings each year, and to some extent that’s what we always see in this comparison.”

There are only 30 professors, 103 associate professors and 107 assistant professors at the three four-year campuses, compared to more than 400 in each category at the Pittsburgh campus, he noted.

“So a move of even one or two people can make a difference,” Pack said.

The regionals, excepting Titusville, also are not so different in their academic goals and missions that one would expect them to have different salary policies, Pack maintained. “So we’re trying to get a reasonable group to compare them to altogether. What we’ll do, based on these salary data, we’ll go back and talk with the presidents and look at material we’ve done before,” he said.

Pack was referring to the list of 270 four-year category IIB baccalaureate schools in the Middle Atlantic, East North Central and South Atlantic regions in the United States. In 2005, regional campus presidents, in consultation with the central administration, agreed to a plan that would compare faculty salaries at the three regional campuses to that broader group.

But BPC members, as well as faculty governing groups at the regionals, have argued that the group of 270 is too unwieldy and includes a number of institutions that are not appropriate peers.

A plan, developed by an ad hoc committee named by the then-UPJ faculty president and including representatives from the UPG and UPB campuses, proposed using another methodology that recommended comparing salaries at the three regionals with a group of 22 schools. (See April 27, 2006, University Times.)

That plan was approved by the UPJ Faculty Council in April 2006, with the proviso that it would not be submitted to Pitt’s central administration for approval until the corresponding faculty bodies at Pitt-Bradford and Pitt-Greensburg also agreed to the benchmark list.

Pitt-Bradford’s Faculty Senate Council “overwhelmingly approved” the list last month, according to Stephen Robar, president of the UPB faculty.

Robar told the University Times that the list of 270 IIB schools previously had been incorporated into the regional’s five-year strategic plan (2004-2009). He praised the efforts of UPB President Livingston Alexander for expediting that incorporation, which he said gave the campus a good starting point for salary benchmarking.

“But in the annual budget narrative that we submit to the Provost’s office, I lobbied and succeeded in changing the wording slightly to allow for other benchmarks to be employed,” pending approval, Robar said. He also acknowledged that the list of 22 institutions derived from the ad hoc committee would founder unless the Greensburg campus faculty approved it.

Former UPG President Sayre Greenfield said his faculty group was waiting until the Bradford faculty had endorsed the list because, if they didn’t, it would be pointless to approve it when it would be doomed to non-consideration.

Greenfield told the University Times that by the time UPB faculty had endorsed the list in mid-April there were no more faculty meetings scheduled at UPG.

His successor as UPG Faculty Senate president, Mark T. Stauffer, said that the discussion of the proposed benchmark list will continue in the fall.

“I’m currently bringing myself up to speed on the history of the salary benchmarking issue,” Stauffer told the University Times following the Bradford faculty vote. “At this time, at least, I would not feel comfortable venturing an opinion on it. Ultimately, our faculty will make their collective voice heard on this issue when it does come up for a vote. As president of the Pitt-Greensburg Faculty Senate, I shall respect whatever decision they make.”

The approvals by the three faculty bodies may be moot, as far as garnering central administration approval, Pack indicated, although he did not rule it out.

At a BPC meeting in May 2006, Pack expressed his “serious reservations” about the composition of the 22-school comparison group. He said the methodology employed by the ad hoc committee that developed the list was based on a submission error.

Pack argued that the University, in an oversight, had been mis-categorizing the regional campuses’ faculty for a number of years in its federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reporting as having a “combined instructional/research/public service” faculty, rather than an “instructional” faculty, which he said more accurately reflects the faculty at the regionals.

(IPEDS is the source from which the list of 22 benchmark institutions is derived, although the ad hoc committee included 11 institutions that matched other criteria but fell in either the “Masters II” or “Baccalaureate/Associates” categories, in addition to 11 institutions in the “Baccalaureate-Liberal Arts” and “Baccalaureate-General” categories of the three Pitt regionals’ classifications.)

Pack said Pitt mistakenly chose the combined category long ago and the mistake was not corrected until this year. He argued that changing the reporting category would change the list of schools that the ad hoc committee recommended.

While acknowledging at the May 4 meeting that comparing Pitt’s regionals with AAU public branch campuses is imperfect, in part because member institutions in that group have changed markedly over time due to changes in institutional structure, Pack defended using the list of 270 schools from a broad geographic area.

“We also have to look at this in the context of what’s going on in Pittsburgh at the same time, to find something that’s like [an approved regional benchmark group],” Pack told BPC last week. “Part of the issue is what are the salary increase practices for Pittsburgh relative to the regionals. This is a political issue about whether they’re seeing a steady erosion because of discretionary salary policies,” he said. “So as we move forward in analyzing this, we need to put Pittsburgh in a similar constellation to measure whether movement in terms of percentage increases is relatively the same over time.”

—Peter Hart


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