Faculty Experience Doesn’t Always Pay

The paychecks of professors continue to be squeezed by the lingering effects of the recession.

Tight finances on many campuses have led to another year in which average salaries barely increased, exacerbating inequities facing seasoned faculty members, whose salaries are stagnating while their newly hired peers are compensated at competitive market rates.

That anomaly in pay, called salary compression, means that the paychecks of experienced faculty are only slightly bigger than those of new professors. Some fields, including economics and philosophy, are experiencing salary inversion, in which new assistant professors earned more than the average for assistant professors in 2009-10, according to data from the American Association of University Professors. In business administration and management, the salaries of new assistant professors have raised the pay for that rank so much that the average assistant professor earned more than the average higher-ranked associate professor last year.

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Tough budget climates tend to make the problem worse because raises for longtime employees are small, if they receive any bump in pay at all. And the opportunities for professors to maneuver around salary compression by moving to another institution become limited in a tight job market.

The AAUP’s latest annual report on faculty salaries urges administrators to pay closer attention to salary compression and other issues that affect the paychecks of professors. Titled “It’s Not Over Yet,” it shows that the average salary of a full-time faculty member in 2010-11 increased by just 1.4 percent over the previous year. That’s barely above last year’s increase of 1.2 percent, which was the lowest year-to-year change in the survey’s 50-year history.

Since the increase in faculty salaries didn’t outpace the inflation rate of 1.5 percent, professors’ buying power fell, the report noted. Many longtime employees, to their dismay, aren’t likely to see any widening of the gap between their pay and that of new hires anytime soon. “Smart administrators are planning how to deal with this even in the current environment,” said Saranna R. Thornton, a professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession. The ability to maintain faculty morale is at stake, she said.

“Generally speaking, when you have two people with relatively equal training, the person who has more experience expects to be paid more,” says Ms. Thornton, who wrote the report with John W. Curtis, the AAUP’s director of research and public policy. “Not just because of seniority, but because over the years you’ve become a better teacher, a better scholar, a better adviser. You just have more experience all around.”

Salary compression and inversion occur in multiple disciplines, but the differences in pay the phenomena create between ranks is more pronounced in some fields than others. In library science, according to the AAUP report, the average assistant professor earned about 93 percent as much as the average new assistant professor—the biggest discrepancy among all disciplines in 2009-10, the most recent year for which data are available. In philosophy and in economics, too, new assistant professors were paid more than their experienced assistant-professor colleagues.

In business administration and management, both assistant and associate professors saw salary inversions, said the report. In those fields, associate professors, on average, earned slightly less than assistant professors did. Starting salaries for business professors tend to be higher than for faculty in other fields, because of job-seekers’ ability to land private-sector work that pays more than academe. Luring them to the classroom means giving them a salary that surpasses some professors who are already there.

Tricky Time to Move

“Salary compression remains a problem,” says Michael Fields, dean of the business school at Nova Southeastern University. “If a faculty member wants to stay close to market, they realize they’re going to have to move to do that.”

But the economic environment makes moving tricky. New jobs are harder to come by, and in some cases could be harder to keep, adding risk that taking a chance on a change in campus would pay off.

“With so many states having budgetary difficulties that are trickling down to state institutions, there’s a potentially higher cost for moving now,” Mr. Fields says. “For a period of time you may be untenured, and if the institution gets into some serious financial difficulties ... that gives you a little more pause in pursuing that strategy.”

Sometimes it’s in colleges’ best interest to try to keep professors from moving, particularly if they are senior faculty, Mr. Fields says. “Many times they are the real workhorses in the school. It would be very costly to lose them.”

He suggests that deans facing a cash crunch identify those faculty members who are crucial to their schools and find additional duties and responsibilities for them to take on, to justify increasing their compensation package without adding to their base salaries. “You have to look for ways to send the message to great faculty members that they’re important to you,” Mr. Fields says.

Even when administrators don’t face dire money problems, they still have to make hard choices that frustrate faculty members, says Virginia Sapiro, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University.

“If you’re in a university where there is actually a pool of money for salary increases, or if there’s only a small pool, then you tend to use that to reward those people who are really going the extra mile right now,” she says. “Some of the people who are most subject to salary compression are people who just do a really good job all the time. They’re incredibly valuable to the university, above the bar in doing good work at a major research university, and that’s just come to be expected of them. They can fall behind, and they get bitter.”

Said Ms. Sapiro: “You’re trying to do right by people but you can only do so much.”

In a memorandum last month that outlines an annual merit-review process, Ms. Sapiro urged department chairs in her college to “be on guard to avoid inappropriate salary compression among junior faculty that results from starting salaries that rise faster than merit pools.” When productive assistant professors make less than new assistant professors, she says, it “sends the wrong signal to them about their progress and about Boston University’s commitment to them.”

That’s a signal familiar to senior professors at many colleges. Ulf Zimmermann, a professor of public administration at Kennesaw State University, says via e-mail that “the impact of salary compression has really hit me this year.”

Over the past few years, he says, he’s had to weather a 2-percent raise, no raises at all, and six furlough days. Mr. Zimmermann, who has been at Kennesaw State since 1993, says his dean has tried to increase the pay of associate and full professors who earn less than new hires, but “so far the money hasn’t been there,” due to state budget troubles.

Most senior faculty don’t want to leave, though, because “they want to keep working on what we’ve built here,” Mr. Zimmerman wrote. Indeed, when he went to Kennesaw State to start its master’s program in public administration, the institution had about 9,000 students, fewer than half of its enrollment today.

Pay Adjustments

At the University of Cincinnati, a joint committee of faculty and administrators began to study the problem of salary compression three years ago.

As negotiations about how to solve the issue got under way, administrators wanted to allow deans to dole out money on a case-by-case basis, says John T. McNay, a professor of history and president of the local chapter of the AAUP. But the faculty union thought salary compression should be resolved in a more systematic way.

Last fall the parties agreed on a contract, which lasts until 2013, calling for professors to get a “compression adjustment.” This year faculty receive an increase in their base salary amounting to a 0.099 percent for each year of service up to 12 years. In the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years, base salaries are to increase by 0.066 percent for each year of service up to 12 years.

“It was a victory for us to get that into the contract. We didn’t get a huge amount of money, but it’s a starting point,” Mr. McNay says. “We think, over time, that this will definitely get at the issue.”

Professors at Saint Louis University would like to see something similar happen on their campus. The Faculty Senate recently presented the administration with data that it says show that professors there are underpaid compared with those at peer universities.

Late last year the senate proposed that the institution set aside $2-million solely for department chairs and other administrators to use during the next academic year to deal with salary compression—about which anecdotal evidence was surfacing—but administrators haven’t responded, says Mark M. Knuepfer, a medical-school professor who is chair of the senate’s committee on compensation and fringe benefits.

“This is an extremely difficult problem to address because of the lack of metrics,” says Mr. Knuepfer, who is president-elect of the Faculty Senate. “Without someone on the administration taking an active role in this, there just seems to be no good solution.”