Your Pay Is Terrible? You’re Not Alone. Higher Education Has A Compensation Problem.

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  Your Pay Is Terrible? You’re Not Alone. Higher Education Has a Compensation Problem, by Kevin R. McClure (University of North Carolina-Wilmington):

College employees have navigated a dizzying array of changes since the pandemic, but one thing has stayed largely the same: their paychecks. Poor compensation is a bedrock feature of working in higher education, as seemingly immovable and enduring as the main administration building.

Although some institutions bumped salaries by modest amounts in a bid to attract and retain talent in the aftermath of the Great Resignation, pay for many employees remains astonishingly low. The National Education Association reported that in 2023 education-support professionals — those working in administrative support, custodial services, food services, and skilled trades — earned less on average than a living wage in every state and Washington, D.C. A 2020 survey of instructors at four community colleges and one university found that 38 percent of respondents experienced some form of basic-needs insecurity.

As part of my research on the higher-education workplace, I’ve interviewed scores of staff and faculty at a variety of institutions across the country. Many have expressed frustration with their salaries and felt that even during tight budgets there have been resources for all manner of projects and initiatives — just not for raises. But workers aren’t just fed up with wages that feel cemented in place. They are also exasperated by the archaic processes that determined their paychecks — their institutions’ compensation practices. ...

 The American Association of University Professors’ “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2021-22,” found that average salaries for full-time faculty increased by 2 percent, continuing a trend of nearly flat wage growth indexed against inflation since 2008. ...

[S]ecuring a raise in higher education can be a herculean task. Raise processes can be unpredictable and opaque, as some institutions fluctuate year to year between cost-of-living adjustments, one-time bonuses, and merit raises. It’s not always clear to employees who is getting paid more and why. One study of merit pay showed that raises were too small to motivate faculty members, and institutions used performance criteria that were difficult to measure. Aware of the limited prospects for a raise, new hires have become savvier in negotiating their base pay, leading to salary compression or inversion, where new hires earn nearly the same or more than peers who have been at the institution for years.

Of course, compensation is not bad for all higher-education employees. Pay disparities between different positions — especially between senior administrators and rank-and-file faculty and staff — is only intensifying. Examining salaries for faculty and senior administrators between 2007 and 2015, the higher-education scholar Martin J. Finkelstein and colleagues saw evidence of “the general trend in higher education and the economy as a whole of increasing distance between senior executives and production workers.” According to CUPA-HR data from 2020, provosts on average earned $205,000 a year and business-school deans earned $204,000. By contrast, career counselors brought home just $50,000 a year on average, and it was lower still for academic advisers ($46,000), admissions counselors ($42,000), and administrative assistants ($37,000). To be clear, it’s not necessarily the case that administrators are just overpaid. Instead, the problem is that the majority of workers aren’t paid enough and don’t have equal earning possibilities. ...

Most higher-education employees don’t enter this line of work expecting fancy titles or wealth. They do, however, expect to be paid on time and to be accurately and fairly rewarded for their contributions. Sound compensation practices shouldn’t be seen as rare luxuries but rather non-negotiable operating costs of running effective organizations.