Report on Faculty Salary and Composition
Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty
May 2002
Introduction
This salary
report of the Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty (CESF) offers an
overview of faculty composition and compensation for each of the schools and
colleges on the Ann Arbor Campus. This
report is the result of a cooperative effort between the former Provost and
administrative staff and members of the CESF and Senate Assembly during which
the administration offered the present data set to provide the faculty with a
more transparent, optimal and equitable view of faculty salaries.
CESF wishes to thank the central administration and the academic units
for their assistance in providing this information.
The report is intended to assist faculty and administrators in
understanding the structure of compensation in their own school or college and
within the University as a whole. The report will be available as web based
document for UM faculty and staff and in printed form to others upon request. Terms are defined by following the link associated with each
term.
Background/History
The
Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty (CESF) advises and consults
with the Regents and the University administration on budgetary matters as they
pertain to the economic status of the faculty; formulates specific requests
regarding salaries and fringe benefits for faculty members and presents a
detailed annual report of findings and recommendations to the Senate Assembly,
and an annual report to the Regents. For the past seven years CESF has focused
its efforts on the development of a set of university
wide faculty compensation guidelines. The
CESF guidelines were presented to the Regents on April 21, 1998 and endorsed by
the Senate Assembly on May 18 1998.
Subsequently,
Provost Cantor appointed a Faculty
Compensation Guidelines Study Committee to advise her on "implementing
a set of guidelines for determining faculty compensation in order to improve the
quality, legitimacy and transparency of faculty salary determination." The
Provost's Study Committee broadened the agenda for study beyond the annual merit
program to include a review of a variety of factors affecting overall faculty
compensation, including market adjustments and retention offers. The Provost's
Study Committee made its report and recommendations on April 26, 2000 and was
approved by the Deans.
The Provost's
Study Committee reported that... "each unit could well benefit from the
opportunity for an open appraisal of the effect of their systems of reward for
consequences on, for example, productivity over time, equity across race and
gender, compression of salaries compared to comparable units in peer
institutions, market offers, retention offers, etc."
PURPOSE
The purpose of
this report is to provide information that can serve as a base upon which the
faculty and administration in each academic unit can begin to develop a
meaningful dialog about the factors that influence decisions on salary and other
elements of compensation. CESF
wishes to caution both faculty and administration that this report provides
gross data and that it is important not to take the numbers out of context. CESF's
goal was simply to gather and present the data with the objective of fostering
transparency to permit rational efforts to improve faculty compensation and
facilitate fair, equitable and optimal compensation and the enhanced
productivity and job satisfaction that such compensation fosters. The
committee is drawing no conclusions from the data nor recommending policy
changes based on the limited data available at this point.
ONE-PAGE OVERVIEWS OF
COMPENSATION
Faculty
compensation for tenured and tenure-track faculty has been presented for each of
the Ann Arbor campus schools and colleges as well as the campus collectively.
The data sheets that follow present maximum, minimum, median, and mean
published salary rates by rank. Additional
information is displayed graphically in the form of "box and whisker"
plots in the lower right-hand corner of the data sheets.
For an explanation of box
graphs please click here. There are also bar graphs showing of the
composition of the faculty in each school and a breakdown of gender by rank.
The
box and whiskers graphs in this report have the great advantage of giving a
clear and vivid sense of the spread and clumping of published compensation
within a unit. There are a number of outliers above the boxes, and it is
reasonable to expect these. Some
may be due to administrative overload payments, while others may reflect the
fact that market forces are a powerful boost to the salaries of the most
productive and most renowned. What is not so clear is the outliers underneath
the box. Surely some of these are
due to faculty whose research program stalled, or whose energies have gone more
to service and teaching than to research, or who work in areas no longer deemed
attractive or potentially for some whose pay falls more in the unpublished or at
risk category than others.
However,
we are aware that many faculty also pay a "loyalty tax" and find their
salaries subject to depreciation with respect to their peers, in part because
they do not trawl for outside offers, in part because they prefer their
situation here, and in part because market forces have raised the salaries of
those who arrived later at a rate higher than the average local rate of merit
increases. Depreciation of loyal
faculty member's salaries, the "loyalty tax", has been an object of
CESF concern over the years, and some outliers below the box may be concrete
evidence of its effects although the committee would need further study to draw
a definitive conclusion in this regard.
Tables
display the average payment amount for published salary rates and unpublished
salary payments. The
unpublished payments are not reflected in the box plots because at this time we
do not have a breakdown by individuals. For details on the type of
unpublished salary payments please see Appendix A.
Aggregate
published salary data broken down by the sensitive issue of gender were provided
to the committee by the administration. Data
reflect some differences in compensation between male and female faculty,
particularly at the high end of the pay scale.
This can vary significantly from one unit to another, and the precise
cause of this discrepancy cannot be determined based on the information
currently available to the committee. Time
in rank, optimal pay for high performers, and administrative responsibilities
might be potential contributing factors. Gender
specific data are only available for base or published salary rates. It is
unclear what impact analysis of unpublished salary payments broken down by
gender would have on these similarities and differences.
The
University's contribution to the economic status of individual faculty members
depends on both published and unpublished compensation.
Published salary rates are reported in the annual report "An
Analysis of Salaries Paid to the University of Michigan Instructional Staff and
Graduate Students” known as the “yellow book", and in the “University
of Michigan Faculty and Staff Record” available in the library reporting
individual faculty's salary rates. The yellow book is the source of the
published salary data referred to in this document. Incentive payments may take the form of unpublished salary
payments. The use of incentive pay
on campus has often been opaque, with it being unclear to faculty in many units
how to get incentive pay or the magnitude of incentive pay available for extra
teaching or research effort, administrative effort, or stellar productivity.
This is the
first open presentation of incentive payments for University of Michigan faculty
of which we are aware. The use of
incentive pay varies greatly across units.
Most units offer some faculty a fraction of pay above base salary, which
usually appears on paychecks as Form G compensation, summer ninths or even
directly labeled as incentive pay. Aggregate
data for the business, medical and dental schools reflect the more broad use of
unpublished pay, making analysis of the published salary data for these units an
even less reliable reflection of actual pay than for other units.
Over the past ten years the composition
of the faculty is changing to include more faculty members who are not
on the tenure track including lecturers, research scientists, clinical and
adjunct faculty. In order to
understand the total picture of compensation within a school data on these
faculty members has been requested.
CAVEATS ON
DATA INTEGRITY. The presented data
were time consuming for the administration to retrieve, as incentive pay and
form G payments had not been previously aggregated for presentation in this
fashion. The data for each school
or college is taken from several different sources and therefore may reflect
different time periods. When a
faculty member holds a joint appointment the salary data is reported under the
school or college where the largest appointment fraction is held. The data used
is the most current information available to the committee at the time of this
report.
CONCLUSION
The CESF has
worked to develop a partnership with the administration in offering this
overview of faculty composition and compensation.
It is the committee’s hope that the this report will be only the first
step in establishing an open and productive discussion between faculty and
administration about the factors that influence decisions on salary and other
elements of compensation in each school. CESF
stresses the need for a more thorough review and analysis before conclusions can
be drawn from the data.
CESF
hopes faculty and administration will find the report useful. The committee asks
for your input about the data that you would like to see and the questions you
feel are posed by that data that CESF should be exploring in the future. Please
send your comments and feedback to cesf@umich.edu
Next Steps for CESF
In order to
present a more complete overview for each of the schools and colleges CESF hopes
to obtain additional data including: maximum, minimum and median amounts for
total salary payments (published plus unpublished); salary rates and unpublished
salary payments by gender, age and number of years in rank, and for the
non-tenure track faculty as well as tracking trends in faculty compensation over
time. It is our goal to build upon the data and expand the scope in next year's
report.
TO ACCESS THE
ONE-PAGE OVERVIEWS OF FACULTY COMPENSATION
Access to the
one-page faculty salary overview for each school is restricted to UM Faculty and
Administrative Staff members, therefore, you will need a password.
You will need Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to view these files. (if you do not have Adobe Acrobat 5.0, please click here to
download now)
Please click
on the name of the school or college to follow the link.
3
Year Trend - Published Salary Data, All Schools
Ann
Arbor Campus Overview
Architecture
and Urban Planning
Art and Design
Business Administration
Education
Engineering
Dentistry
Information
Kinesiology
Law
Literature, Science and Arts
LSA - Humanities Division
LSA – Natural Sciences Division
LSA – Social Sciences Division
Medical School
Medical School – Basic Sciences
Medical School – Clinical Services
Music
Natural Resources and Environment
Nursing
Pharmacy
Public Health
Public Policy*
Social Work
*– because the great majority of faculty in School
of Public Policy hold joint appointments a salary data overview was not
developed for this school. Faculty
salaries are reported in the school with the greatest percentage of the
appointment.