Page 275 - Crisis in Higher Education

246 • Crisis in Higher Education

11.5.3.3 Improving Productivity for Nonexempt Support Staff
Nonexempt support staffers, like secretaries, paralegals, and lab assistants,
may work inside a process that supports students and faculty, but they
are not responsible for one. They need training, tools, and technologies to
help them do their jobs better, faster, and cheaper. These needs should be
identified through value stream mapping, process redesign, and continu-
ous improvements efforts. In fact, support staff should be involved in these
efforts because they can provide useful information about the current pro-
cess and may have valuable insights about how to make it better.

11.5.4 Addressing Skyrocketing Administrative Salaries
Although administrative headcount has increased dramatically, their sal-
aries have also increased faster than the salaries of tenured faculty and
faster than the rate of inflation. When adjusted for inflation, salaries of
presidents at public universities increased by 75% between 1979 and 2014,
salaries of provosts increased by more than 50%, and salaries for tenured
professors increased by about 23%. At private institutions, the percentages
were even higher at 171%, 110%, and 45%, respectively. 20
Benchmarking has put upward pressure on administrative salaries. When
hiring new administrators or responding to a request to boost the salary
of an “underpaid” administrator, data from other universities are exam-
ined. These data are readily available from entities like the CUPA-HR.
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The tendency is to pay a new hire an above-average salary, which raises
the average for the next hire and so on and so on. Also, if a university hires
a business college dean, the annual salary in 2014–2015 would have been
$334,130, while the provost only made slightly more. Even if the provost
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does not appeal, the board may feel the need to boost the provost’s salary.
Plus, the deans in engineering and education who were making $286,989
and $210,636, respectively, may request additional compensation.
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Because setting salary is a judgment call, making boards of trustees
aware of the problems with benchmarking may be helpful, but the better
action is to increase competition. This means stopping the current prac-
tice of hiring from the limited pool of professional managers that other
universities are pursuing. Whether the search is for president, provost, or
dean, universities tend to hire a search firm to help with the process. These
firms have lists of the same people, so the pool is still limited. Universities
must work together to create a richer pool of qualified candidates by being