Kevin McClure has a thought-provoking piece about compensation absurdities in higher ed. It’s worth a read, and readers may recognize many of his examples.
I couldn’t resist a prompt like that.
To start with the obvious, adjunct pay across most of higher education is a scandal. It’s a scandal that has deep structural roots, but a scandal nonetheless.
But some absurdities are less obvious.
If I could wave a magic wand one time and eliminate one absurdity, it would be to decouple health insurance from employment. Too many times I’ve been in budget discussions in which pay increases were projected in the 2 to 3 percent range annually, but health insurance increases were expected (accurately!) to hit double digits. The money paid on the employer side goes up, but the employees never see it. We wind up in mutually frustrating situations in which the institution sees significantly increased costs while the employees see flat or nearly flat paychecks. In a labor-intensive industry like higher education, rates of increase like those we see in health insurance are suffocating.
(Insurance generally needs serious rethinking. When it’s for-profit, the incentives are completely wrong. I’ve been wrestling with my mom’s long-term care insurance company for a solid year, even continuing to pay premiums, and they haven’t sent a cent. Every few weeks brings a new form to fill out, which leads to another and another. She paid premiums for decades, and now we’re paying them, and all we get is a slow cascade of forms. That this is legal is patently absurd.)
When I worked in Massachusetts, the state had a rule that no class that started after 4:00 p.m. could count toward a professor’s regular load. When enrollments peaked around 2010, we got pretty shameless about running classes that started at 3:45. Anything that started after 4:00 had to be paid on an adjunct basis (“at no cost to the Commonwealth”), regardless of student demand or who taught it. I never heard a coherent argument for it, but it was the law and apparently had been for a long time. There wasn’t even an exception for “by mutual agreement.” I don’t know if that’s still true, and I’m guessing that the growth of online programs has reduced evening enrollments there by now, but the rule itself never made sense.
In that setting, too, the collective bargaining agreement was so strict and prescriptive that I literally quoted job candidates salary offers that ended with “and 25 cents.” I’m not sure which person on the call was more embarrassed by that.
Salary scales are tough, too, when they badly lag the industries in which people teach. In fields like nursing or cybersecurity, folks with industry experience take significant pay cuts to teach full-time. I’m glad they do—more so than they know, especially for nursing—but it’s hard to maintain internal equity across fields when the external differences are so wide. In practice, what tends to happen is very thin candidate pools and a series of failed searches in high-demand fields, even as folks in other fields struggle to find work. That has an obvious impact on the availability of classes in high-demand areas.
“Soft money” positions—that is, positions funded by grants—bring issues of their own. I’ve had cases in which grants were awarded in late September for an Oct. 1 start. (Savvy readers will recognize the start of the federal fiscal year.) Public sector hiring takes months, given all the requirements around public notification and the structure of search committees. It may be December by the time someone is in the role, putting the grant behind schedule from the start. Grants increasingly incorporate “sustainability” requirements, in which recipients pledge to keep positions and activities going after the grant expires. While it’s a lovely idea, it requires colleges to project state and local appropriations, and health insurance costs, five years into the future. We didn’t even know what this year’s state appropriation would be until several months into the year; projections five years out are guesses at best.
Now, if states and counties were held to “sustainability” requirements …
At least at the community college level, where high-profile sports are not a factor, most compensation absurdities boil down to insufficient funding over all. (I will not defend some of the spending on high-profile sports at certain flagship universities that shall go unnamed.) Given enough money, or a saner health insurance regime, it would be much easier to afford reasonable raises.
Have you seen some head scratchers around compensation? I’d love to hear them at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
