Schools stealingfaculty with higher pay offers

By Steve Abercrombie
and Tom Merry
The Washington Daily

SEATTLE - It is a concern that President Richard McCormick has diagnosed as a top priority in maintaining the excellence of a University of Washington education - keeping up with its peer institutions in faculty pay.

Competitive salaries will attract quality faculty and encourage the good ones to stick around. So goes the logic.

But in recent years the UW has begun to fall behind, and the numbers show it. The average UW faculty salary for 1997-98 was more than 4 percent below its 8-member peer group, $69,138 compared with $72,179. Compounding that is the fact that Seattle has one of the higher costs of living among the group. When that is taken into consideration, UW faculty salaries are 26 percent behind the school's peers.

According to a report presented to the Faculty Senate by the ad hoc advisory committee on faculty salaries, "Many current UW faculty members do not receive a salary sufficient to allow them to purchase a home in the Seattle metropolitan area." The report concludes that faculty salaries at the UW must be raised so the University can stay competitive with peer institutions and keep its faculty from leaving.

Getting whisked away

"The quality of our institutions depends more upon the excellence of our faculty than upon any other single factor," McCormick told the Higher Education Coordinating Board last fall. The UW faculty includes four Nobel Prize winners (the only in the Northwest), three winners of the National Medal of Science, seven MacArthur Fellows, 38 members of the National Academy of Sciences and many holders of other varied honors.

When other schools around the nation need to fill open positions, the UW is a logical place to look. The higher salaries are hard for many to resist, and the UW can do little to make them stay.

UW Vice Provost Steve Olswang said, "If a dean comes to me asking for a retention offer, the answer is probably going to be 'no,' because we have no money."

But losing faculty is only part of the problem. According to Kevin Evanto of UW government relations, when professors leave, often assistants, graduate students and research grant money leave with them.

"The quality of the institution diminishes when top faculty leave. It's a real loss for the state as a whole," Evanto said in January.

"Higher education institutions compete in a national and often an international market for faculty, and the institutions in our state are falling behind," McCormick said. "We can't recruit and retain the faculties that have made our institutions first-rate unless we pay them better."

McCormick said that even with pay increases this year, the UW will remain four to six years behind. In literature from the office of the Vice Provost of Planning and Budgeting, national faculty and professional staff salaries are expected to increase an average of seven percent in the coming biennium, which means that the UW will need to increase its pay even faster to provide competitive salaries.

State support

Professors typically receive a cost-of living increase in their salaries every two years. Additionally, they are supposed to receive periodic merit reviews and raises as mandated in the Faculty Code of the University Handbook.

According to the report to the Faculty Senate by the ad hoc committee on faculty salaries but, budgetary concerns have impeded regular merit raises.

Among the ways that the UW proposes correcting the problem is to begin granting pay raises to all its faculty at an average of four percent per year, starting in the 1999 to 2001 budget. But these dollars must come from somewhere, either from increased state appropriations or increased tuition.

Before the UW receives its allocation from the state every two years, UW lobbyists always advocate increasing faculty salaries. The state however, often has trouble coming up with the money; Initiative 601 has made it more difficult to find new income sources. Most of this year's proposals to increase faculty salaries would still not succeed at raising them to the national average.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle), chair of the Senate Higher Education committee, advocated for more than the 2 percent-a-year raise proposed by Washington Gov. Gary Locke.

"I want a much larger pool in the budget than the $8 million suggested by the governor," Kohl-Welles said.

From your pocket

Within a college campus, it is well-accepted that quality education is worth paying for. Many administrators and faculty hope that it's also worth paying a little bit more.

As it becomes less likely that the state Legislature will pay for increased salaries, raising tuition seems the inevitable outcome.

According to the ASUW Office of Legislative Affairs, attending the UW costs in-state students $132 less per year than the average of its peer institutions. However, the total cost of attendance (including room, board and other student fees) is $252 more than average. If the UW's peer institutions were not to increase their tuition over the next two years, an increase of $50 a quarter (one of the proposals in front of the Legislature this session) would place the UW near Illinois' $4,522 annual tuition.

Administration sources claim that a 29 percent tuition increase by 2001 could be used to shrink the existing gap between UW faculty salaries and those of its peer institutions. However, many legislators don't feel the students should have to foot the whole bill.

"I am not comfortable with raising tuition to meet market salaries," said Rep. Helen Sommers (D-Seattle), co-chair of the House Appropriations committee. "We should seek more stability."

In a discussion McCormick had with a skeptical Student Senate two weeks ago, he stressed finding an acceptable middle ground between administrators and students regarding tuition increases which would provide more money for faculty pay increases while remaining at a reasonable level for students.

Many student senators appealed to McCormick to obtain increased appropriations from the state to foot the bill. Only in an ideal world, McCormick countered. In fact, McCormick has been lobbying the state Legislature for increased funds, but there simply are not enough, he said.

DOLING OUT DOLLARS

The University's priorities in allocating money to professors are rarely questioned, but also little understood.

The highest-paid professors at the UW make between $85,000 and $100,000 more than the average full professor's salary.

A number of these faculty members are department chairs as well as professors. Four of the top-10 wage-earners are chairs, directors or chiefs of their departments, entailing greater responsibility than just teaching. Eight of the 10 are in medical or medical technology fields.

According to LG Blanchard, spokesperson for the UW school of medicine, there are a number of contributing factors that create a gap in faculty salaries.

"Generally speaking, salaries are set based on peer institutions, training, length of experience and market forces," Blanchard said. "There are market differences between [universities] as well as differences between schools of medicine and other schools. However, like faculty across the board, UW [medical school] faculty salaries fall well below salaries for peer institutions. [Medical School faculty], like their colleagues, need to do better."

Blanchard said medical school faculty typically finish more than 11

years of post-secondary education before they can even qualify for the most basic medical school teaching positions. The demands of a medical education, along with a thriving market for medical faculty, buoy salaries in the med school.

A quality faculty member, if paid enough, hypothetically would have less reason to leave. However, even salaries that are the highest in an institution don't prevent offers from other institutions of significantly higher wages. According to the UW's highest-paid professor, Dr. Edward Verrier, medical school professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery, he has received numerous offers that would substantially increase his salary.

03-18-99