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Faculty Assembly


Salary Enhancement Committee Update
Filed to UCCS RF A by Mark Malone - April 14, 2000

Important decisions will be made in the coming week. The current projections for solving salary compression issues look less favorable than were previously told. Despite the best budget increases our campus has seen in many years, less money has been earmarked for salary than was previously announced. UCCS will receive approximately $3,000,000 in new dollars for the coming year. In a campus budget ofover $19,000,000, only half of the $200,000 recommended to solve salary compression of regular faculty and half of the $100,000 needed to address problems of nontenure track faculty have been recommended.

This $300,000 could have alleviated the salary equity problems over the course of roughly 4 years. The current rate of funding will push the solution at least eight years in the future. If we can not find $300,000 to help faculty in the best budget year in memory, what chance to we have to solve this problem in the future. How many good tenure track faculty and how many nontenure track faculty will be lose if we do not fix this problem? How many students will be under served if we allow our faculty to deteriorate?

This week we had another meeting of the Salary Enhancement committee. At this meeting Bob Carlson reported on his work since the previous meeting. His work reinforced other information indicating that salary issues compression is a real and measurable problem. His data is somewhat unique in that it looks at the data with after specific outlyers are remove. Specifically salaries of individuals who have returned to the faculty from administrative positions or who were brought in as senior faculty were excluded.

The data indicate that UCCS has attracted and hired Assistant Professors at salaries that are competitive with salaries at peer institutions (100.6 % of Peer Institutions). Although it should be noted that the average salaries of our new peer comparison groups are lower than those of our previous comparison groups.

The largest discrepancies from the median salary of' our "Official Peer Comparison Group" occur at the Associate and Full Professor ranks. Compression begins with Associate Professors. level (94.6 % of Peer Institutions). Significant discrepancies continue to grow at the Full Professor level especially with faculty members who have worked for the University for under 20 years (89.7% of Peer Institutions).

In addition, specific data was broken out by Schools.  Peer comparisons for specific schools are reported below:

--Engineering- (100.9 % of Peer Institutions or 0.9% above median)
--Business- (100.5 % of Peer Institutions or 0.5% above median)
--LAS - (96 % of Peer Institutions or 4% below median)
--Education - (94 % of Peer Institutions or 6% below median)

The numbers above do not reflect disparities in non salary compensation problems. If factors like increasing health care costs, parking fees, etc. were considered, our overall compensation package is even worse.

The Salary Enhancement Committee will next be working to create a model tor equitably distributing
moneys should they become available. With perseverance, there will be money to distribute.