Moments after President Obama called on businesses to raise their employees’ wages during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, he won his first convert in higher education. David Rowe, president of Centenary College of Louisiana, decided to heed the president’s call and increase the minimum wage for all university employees to $10.10 an hour, effective immediately.
“It dawned on me that not only was I a father, but I was also an employer,” said Mr. Rowe on Thursday. “I had a responsibility to the institution and my employees, but also to the model I’m setting for my sons and the climate I’m helping to create for the next generation.”
Mr. Rowe is one of many college and university presidents who have struggled lately to balance budgetary pressures against what they describe as an obligation to bring their pay scales in line with the values of their institutions. According to a recent estimate, approximately 700,000 college employees, including janitors and food-service workers, earn less than a living wage, or an amount sufficient to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their families.
Mr. Rowe said 25 of Centenary’s 311 employees were making less than $10.10 an hour before he raised their pay. The United Methodist-affiliated college’s minimum wage now aligns with the standard that President Obama set for workers covered by new federal contracts. The previous federal minimum was $7.25 an hour.
Mr. Rowe also asked Centenary’s two major vendors, National Resource Management and Sodexo, to observe the same minimum wage, and each agreed.
Campus Budgets, Campus Values
Raises for Centenary employees may have arrived suddenly, but workers at other colleges have already benefited from similar changes over the last few years. In 2011, for example, Austin Peay State University adjusted its minimum wage to match the local living wage, now $10.45 an hour, said Michael Hamlet, assistant vice president and chief human-resource officer.
The raise followed a two-year study of the Tennessee university’s compensation plan that some faculty members found eye-opening. Loretta A. Griffy, an associate professor of mathematics who led the committee that recommended the minimum-wage rise, said she didn’t know what a living wage was before she started poring over university spreadsheets.
“We wanted to say to everybody that you’re valuable to the mission of this institution,” Ms. Griffy said of the administrative assistants and physical-plant workers who were among those making less than $10 an hour before the change. “Each campus has to reflect on their values and mission. Their budgets point to the actual weight of those values.”
Earlier this month, even before Mr. Obama had spoken, Hampton University’s lowest-paid employees got a raise to $9 an hour, thanks in part to a gift from the Virginia institution’s president, William R. Harvey.
Mr. Harvey and his wife donated $108,403 to support the pay increase for more than 120 full-time employees, primarily housekeepers, maintenance-staff members, and cafeteria workers.
A Living Wage
Other colleges—including Georgetown, Stanford, and Vanderbilt Universities—have faced pressure from campus activists to pay their workers a living wage, but not all of them have issued raises accordingly. Students at the University of Virginia, for instance, led a 13-day hunger strike in March 2012 to demand higher wages for the university’s lowest-paid employees and contractors.
The university has raised its minimum wage for salaried employees to $11.53 an hour, a 79-percent increase from a decade ago and well over Virginia’s minimum wage of $7.54 an hour.
But the living wage in Charlottesville, Va., is $13 an hour, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Activists also criticize the university for refusing to guarantee that its large cohort of contract workers are paid the state’s minimum wage.
McGregor McCance, the university’s senior director of media relations, said that UVa lacks the authority to intervene on behalf of its contract workers and that he does not know if it can audit its contractors to determine what they pay. Of the university’s 21,000 employees, about 1,100 are contract workers, he said.
Spurred by President Obama’s call to action, Mr. Rowe, of Centenary College, said he had consulted with budget managers and senior leaders to ensure that raising the campus’s minimum wage was a “financially responsible thing to do.” The challenge now, he said, is to make sure the college’s finances can sustain that effort in the years to come.