by Missy Kline | November 15, 2022
Editor’s note: This blog post, originally published in April 2019, has been updated with additional resources and related content.
Salary benchmarking is not one-size-fits-all — especially when you’re looking at groups as varied as administrators, professionals, staff and faculty on a college or university campus that is unique in its combination of Carnegie class, affiliation, regional location and mission. The question, then, is how to tailor your benchmarking efforts to take these variables into account and choose data that is appropriate to your unique needs.
Here are four considerations to help you make the best use of salary data for compensation budget planning for your faculty and staff:
1) Which institutions should your institution’s salaries be benchmarked against? Making the right comparisons — using position-specific data and carefully selected peers — can make all the difference when planning salaries that will make your institution competitive in the labor market. When you use CUPA-HR’s DataOnDemand, you can narrow down peer institutions by one or several institution-level criteria such as affiliation (public, private indephttp://cupahr.org/surveys/dataondemand/endent or private religious), Carnegie classification, enrollment size, geographic region, total expenses or other characteristics. Remember, balance is key: a larger comparison group gets you more robust data for comparison, but you must also make sure you are comparing to the right types of institutions that make sense for your goals.
2) Not all faculty are the same. Tenure track faculty, non-tenure track teaching faculty, non-tenure track research faculty and adjunct faculty may each require unique compensation strategies, as do faculty members from different disciplines and ranks. Will the same salary increase help retain both tenured and non-tenured faculty? Does collective bargaining impact salary targets for some, but not all, of these faculty sub-groups? Are there unique, fast-growing, or in-demand departments/disciplines that require a separate strategy?
3) Keep in mind that administrator salaries are broadly competitive. Like faculty, many administrative positions in higher ed are competitive at a national level. Often, institutions seek administrators with experience at other institutions of a similar size or mission, and with this experience and mobility comes an expectation of a competitive salary. As higher ed moves toward a “business model” where innovative leadership strategies are displacing more traditional shared governance models, finding administrators with the appropriate skills and expertise is becoming increasingly competitive, not only within higher education but sometimes against the broader executive employment market.
4) Employment competition varies for staff and professionals. Many non-exempt staff are hired from within local labor markets, and therefore other institutions or companies in your state or local Metropolitan Statistical Area might be a better salary comparison than a nationwide set of peer institutions. Exempt or professional staff, however, may be more limited to competition from the higher ed sector, perhaps on a state or regional level. In addition, changes brought about by the pandemic (e.g., remote work opportunities, a desire to relocate) have made many professional positions more globally competitive. Are your institution’s salaries for these employees appropriately scoped for the market in which you need to compete?
Additional Articles and Resources
How One College Is Using Salary Data to Ensure Pay Equity and Market-Par Compensation
Compensation Programs/Plans, Executive Compensation in Higher Ed, Equal Pay Act (CUPA-HR Toolkits)
Working in a Fish Bowl: How One Community College System Navigated a Compensation Study in a Transparent Environment (Higher Ed HR Magazine)
