Negotiating salary settlements for academic staff that involve the professoriate frequently encounters some push-back from the wider community. Faculty salaries are sometimes described as “eye-popping” or “bloated” and all of the faculty salaries publicly revealed in the “sunshine” lists are in the six digits. Yet these academic staff seek raises as part of a fair contract settlement. What is going on? There are many factors that contribute to establishing a fair salary. In this blog we will discuss two: lifetime earnings and market comparators.
Lifetime earnings
When people look at sunshine lists, they are often impressed because they see full-time faculty members earning annual salaries of $150,000 and more. Considering current mean and median salaries in Lethbridge, they might see something like the situation portrayed in Figure 1. This chart models four different salaries for three University of Lethbridge professors. The first professor has been “satisfactory” in annual performance ratings for their entire career, thus earning no “merit increments” (each $502) but qualifying for annual “career progress increments (CPI)” (each $2600). A second professor has been “average” in annual ratings (one CPI and one merit increment every second year). A third professor has regularly been rated as excellent (one CPI and two merit increments annually). For comparison is a person who was hired into a job right after high school and who receives small annual raises. Figure 1 shows the annual salary for all four individuals in their late 50s.
Figure 1. Annual incomes in late 50s for our 4 example cases: a tradesperson entering the work force right after high school and professors earning 0, 0.5, or 2 Merit scores through their career.
The tradesperson, say an equipment operator, looks at the highest of these salaries on the sunshine list and sees that the professor who receives two merit increments is paid almost twice as much, even though the tradesperson has been continuously employed and has worked hard all their life. This does not seem fair and it is particularly galling when the professors are seeking a raise. One fact that remains hidden when looking at only a snap-shot of annual salaries, is the lifetime trajectory of annual earnings.
Figure 2. Modelled annual earnings for four test cases, a tradesperson (model data taken from the `Transport and equipment operators’ category from Statistics Canada) and three professor cases with merit scores of 0, 0.5, and 2.0.
Figure 2 shows the annual salaries of the same four people from age 18 to 65. The hidden feature is that the tradesperson was earning a reasonable salary all through those years. The academic staff members were undertaking full-time post-secondary education with the expense of tuition fees, and were accumulating debt through student loans. In this modelling we have assumed their career-related net income was -$6K/year for 4 years of undergraduate studies, -$2K/year for 2 years of a Master’s degree, and -$1K/years for 5 years of a PhD. This lines up with average domestic tuition fees of approximately $6.5K/year, and an average student debt of $33K after a PhD. The modelling also assumes that all individuals retire at age 65.
Most academic staff have a period after the PhD during which they receive net career-related income much lower than the tradesperson as they start to reduce debt and/or live through a period of precarious employment semester to semester or year by year in short-term contract positions, likely with few if any benefits and no job security. Figure 2 illustrates the assumption that this period lasts until age 40, albeit with increasing income. 40 is the average age at which Assistant Professors are hired at the University of Lethbridge. In our modelling we have set their starting salary to the floor for that rank, which is the salary at which most faculty are hired. The modelling has not taken into account possible career/salary interruptions such as maternity leaves for any of these example cases. When the academic staff members finally receive a continuing or tenure-stream job their annual salaries are typically more than the tradesperson with the annual raises, resulting in the displayed rise in salary.
Typically, academic staff enter into continuing appointments in their late 30s or early 40s. The best way to visualize this is to plot lifetime earnings. Summing the income received in all of the years prior to age 65, one has a picture of the total amount of money that a person has earned. This total allows them to cover the costs of buying a home, vehicles, and clothing, taking vacations, supporting family and raising children, enjoying a comfortable retirement, etc.
But, it is important to note that the additional years of education expenses (and related debt accumulation), typical precarious employment prior to securing a tenure-track appointment, and the absence of a higher salary and raises in the initial phases of their tenure-track position means that the professor who earns no merit increments cannot catch up to the tradesperson in terms of overall earnings.
Figure 3. Lifetime earnings of the 4 modelled test cases.
Figure 3 displays the lifetime earnings for our four modelled workers. Lifetime earnings for two of the three professors are very close to those of the tradesperson. Only the professor on the sunshine list with the “eye-popping” salary exceeds those earnings, but even this difference is not huge, and typically the highly meritorious professoriate often work well in excess of 40 hours per week.
International job market
One might ask: How much should a professor earn over a lifetime relative to a tradesperson or equipment operator? A factor that underpins the answer is the labour market. This is why looking carefully at university comparators for salary and working condition factors is so important. To a significant extent, salaries depend on how much an employee could earn if they quit and accepted a job with a different employer. In the case of academic staff, there is a very strong competitive market for accomplished instructors and researchers.
As mentioned above, academic staff are typically hired as a result of a very competitive, international search in which salaries are conditioned by a global market of academic staff. When salary or working conditions are inadequate, academic staff move to a different university where the conditions are better (or perhaps will be demotivated,resulting in poorer performance). Many academic staff members at the University of Lethbridge have worked at several universities, often in two or more different countries. When conditions are clearly substandard at a university, academic talent drains away to better places, causing a drop in ability to attract students, loss in prestige, and loss of money and educational opportunities afforded by external grant funding.
The ULFA negotiation team presented proposals for Schedule A (Salaries and Stipends) on September 27th, 2021, and on February 4th, 2022. More details on compensation and negotiations are available here and here, Previous Issues on the Table posts on other factors that are implicated in salary proposals have explored the role of comparators and how salaries have been impacted by the cost of living.
