The time is right for an academic professional pay equity audit. Academic professionals and administrators know that the university's system of raises and job categorization is vague and unsystematic, and needs to be overhauled; but to ensure that changes in wages or working conditions are justified, administrators and academic professionals need to know where we currently stand.
Are salaries comparable for academic professionals with similar levels of responsibility, experience, education, and skills? Right now, nobody knows, but the National Education Association (NEA, the national affiliate of the UIUC Association of Academic Professionals) has encountered this problem before, and they have volunteered to help us perform an equity audit. Provost Herman has agreed to meet with the AAP to discuss avenues for collaboration on the project.
It's no secret that the system of AP employment needs improvement. One problem is that job titles have little correlation with pay or job duties. For example, forty percent of APs with who hold the title "research specialist" earn more than some "senior research specialists", and over half of UIUC's "research programmers" make more than some "senior research programmers." The work varies greatly within these titles, so one expects to see a range of salaries, but since "senior" titles exist, one might think that "senior" APs are paid more. But this isn't necessarily the case--there is little correlation between someone's title or job and their salary.
Administrators are aware of the problem. Over a 10-year period no fewer than three reports have called for equity audits, yet administrators have made little progress. In 1988, President Ikenberry commissioned a study by personnel consultant Ray Fortunato. Fortunato recommended that "some order be established for [academic professional] positions in regard to position and salary level," and that a study be conducted to analyze job duties and responsibilities. A stated goal of the study was to "promote salary equity."
Seven years later, a committee led by Professor Reginald Gomes recommended that "periodic salary studies should be conducted by the Academic Human Resources office (for example, every 3-5 years) on a campus-wide basis for assessing the equity and fairness of academic professional pay scales." As of October 1998 the human resources office had no internal equity data, although they do participate in national salary surveys which have been helpful for external comparisons of administrators' salaries.
Finally, the Support Services Strategy report (a.k.a. S3), a major study of university administration performed by Andersen Consulting and completed in August 1998, includes the observation that "rewards/compensation are not uniformly tied to performance . . . . Although a merit system is in place for academic professional and open range employees, the overall result is that salary increases are not effectively tied to performance reviews for many employees."
In some regards, the 10-year delay is understandable. Academic professional job titles and job descriptions are highly diverse. Since an equity audit must be designed carefully to address this complexity, such a study would require the investment of time and money by the administration. To date, nothing has prompted administrators to place academic professional salary equity near the top of their "to do" list. Administrators also speak of their need for managerial flexibility, and pay equity information might show the need for higher salaries than they currently want to pay.
Nonetheless, we in AAP feel that it's time to move ahead and gather the data.
Academic professionals and the administration are fortunate that NEA helped create a survey which addresses diverse job factors and ranks positions accordingly. The system used by NEA was developed by human resource consultants Hubbard & Revo-Cohen specifically for people working in diverse educational settings. The system uses point factors in which each person's job is scored, based upon seven different factors: knowledge and skills, complexity, supervisory responsibility, nature and purpose of personal contacts, coordination, organization and facilitation, and working conditions. To ensure that the result is fair, employees can appeal if they feel they were improperly ranked.
Such a system slices through the complexity of comparing electron microscopists with student advisors, research programmers with pharmacists, or development directors with crop scientists. It compares the common factors in all jobs, but also accommodates differences so that rigid standardization is not imposed.
We look forward to working with the administration to "slay this dragon" and move on to improving compensation for academic professionals. Anyone interested in helping make this the most successful survey possible should contact the AAP office at 337-5174.