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University to bring all faculty to market salary, by rank and discipline

Finally, some movement on the Lariviere/Coltrane plan from 2011, just in time for Friday’s 9AM faculty union bargaining session!

“Market rate is determined by discipline and rank at peer institutions, based on data collected by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The plan is the product of long-term planning among the University Senate, the faculty union, and the administration.”

Oh wait, that’s Eastern Washington University. Bummer. The InsideHigherEd story is here. Their plan has less emphasis on merit than the Lariviere/Coltrane plan, or the similar proposals from the UO faculty union, which would have increased *average* UO salaries by rank and discipline to peer averages, not all salaries to at least the peer average, as at EWU.

Coltrane abandoned the 2011 plan when he became Provost and the administration has repeatedly rejected the faculty union’s external equity proposals, despite some big deviations between UO pay and what faculty earn at our peers. These deviations are largest for full professors, as over time it becomes more costly for faculty to move, and UO’s monopsony bargaining power starts to bite more. Our AAU peers are typically in larger labor markets, and therefore their salaries are more reflective of “the market rate”, if you’re into that perfect competition thing.

All the 2014-15 data is now posted on UO’s IR page: http://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir.uoregon.edu/files/UOwithAAUPublicsbyDept_2014-15.pdf. Unfortunately there are still no good comparator data for NTTF’s, although the AAUP is working on this. As always, check the footnotes. While UO counts one-time faculty excellence awards in pay, it is not clear how many if any of our comparators do. Also, a colleague checked the Econ data and found one full professor was miscoded as associate. This doesn’t affect the full percentages, but it means that the % of AAU salary for UO Econ associates should be 82%, not 92%. Yikes.

Here are a few cherry picked departments, in no particular order:

Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.40.27 AMScreen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.37.33 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.39.19 AM  Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.38.02 AM  Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.37.08 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.36.56 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.36.34 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.35.59 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.35.07 AM Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 10.33.32 AM

3 Comments

  1. that effing Canis again 07/14/2015

    I don’t know what a monopsony is (or how to pronounce it) but I inferred a bit via context. In any event, here is a definition:

    A monopsony is when an employer has market power in the labor market, sort of the employer equivalent of a monopoly. The argument is that a monopsonist is able to hold wage below the equilibrium level, just like a monopolist would hold prices below the competitive equilibrium.

    In addition, I wonder how the percetange comparisons would change if median salary as a function of rank were used instead
    of average. In my own department there are a few full profs that make substantially more than the departmental average and a couple that make way below. My instinct is that the median salary in our department for full profs is less than the average salary.

    Given the mistake that UO matters identified for Econ where a single misclassification resulted in a 10% comparator error, these effects of median vs average may change things by +/- 5% or so.

    • uomatters Post author | 07/14/2015

      Dog: Should say “much as a monopolist would hold prices above the competitive equilibrium.”

      • that effing Canis again 07/14/2015

        right that makes more sense
        how do you correct google?

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