Salary targets should be greatly increased this year

UPDATE: The graphs below aren’t entirely accurate, and they calculate salaries for upper ranks that are too high. Please wait on an explanation from the Provost.

My previous post detailed how my salary target was not where it was supposed to be given the President’s announced salary base values. Here’s some more information.

We should be seeing a pronounced increase in salary targets this year, because last year, due to non-representative data from CUPA for our peer group, our targets were incorrectly set very low relative to our peers for full and associate rank. Jane’s announced base salary values represented this change. For many of us, that’s not what we saw in our contract letters sent out today.

Here’s what should have happened from one year to the next:

This applies two new developments to our model.

One is the shift in baselines due to two factors: (1) using a better peer group this year, and (2) that peer group’s salaries going up as they nearly always do by about 2%. Those two factors are what makes the 2019 lines higher at all ranks than the 2018 lines. Factor (1) applied to full and associate ranks, while Factor (2) applied to all ranks.

The second is the shift from a flat $300/year in target for all tenured/tenure-track faculty to a graduated $300/$500/$700 for assistant/associate/full. That’s what makes the 2019 lines for the upper ranks steeper than the 2018 lines.

2 Comments

  1. The reason some full professor folks are seeing no gain or even a decrease in their targets from 2017 is because the 2017 numbers used a more reasonable (but still low) base. Here’s a graph with the 2017 targets included that shows how the lines could cross from 2017-2019 at Full rank, especially if the values reported for 2019 are several thousand dollars too low, as they appear to be.
    all three years' models
    Of course, last year’s base was ludicrously low relative to peers, especially for Full, which is why it is below all of the other lines.

  2. Dave — thank you SO MUCH for your ongoing work on compensation.I appreciate that getting this process right is tricky and that targets may be low due to honest mistakes or interpretive differences. And that’s why it’s so important to continue to monitor progress, and so AWESOME that you’ve continued to invest the considerable time and energy that such monitoring requires. It’s a real service to the college community. (According to your nifty calculator, my target salary is more than $5,000 lower than it should be.)