Salaries for Syracuse University faculty rank low in comparison with 30 similar institutions, according to the annual Committee Z Report released Feb. 5. But recent proposed changes to employee benefits may hurt SU faculty’s overall compensation as well, said Pat Cihon an associate professor of law and public policy at SU and the president of the American Association of University Professors, which releases the report each year.

This year, SU fell in the rankings from 20th to 21st for average compensation of full-time faculty members. Average compensation combines the amount of salary actually received and the worth of benefits.

SU is the lowest-ranked private university in the group of 30. SU has ranked in the middle of the group for the past decade, Cihon said. In addition to comparing SU’s salary and compensation with other institutions, the report compares salaries between schools within SU and between genders.

In the past, the administration has justified the low ranking with the fact that SU faculty receives comparably higher benefits than faculty at other universities, Cihon said. In his introduction to the report, Cihon wrote that the proposed changes to the benefits will cause the economic status of SU faculty to suffer.

‘We’re at best holding our same position if not sinking,’ he said. ‘And then the impact of benefits on top of that is going to be more significant.’

Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric Spina said average salaries at SU are lower than other universities, but he thinks SU can remain competitive even with the benefits changes. He also said good benefits cannot always be used as an excuse for low comparable salaries.

‘At the end of the day, for a long time, we have used benefits as a crutch, and if we really do have salary issues, the university needs to dig in and work on resolving them,’ he said.

The mean salary for full-time SU professors in 2009-10 is $112,452. The mean salary for male professors is $113,563, and for female professors it is $109,039.

The average compensation, which includes benefits, was not available for 2009-10, but it was $117,000 in 2008-09.

During the 2008-09 year, the university imposed a salary freeze on faculty making more than $50,000 a year, Cihon said.

‘Last year’s salary freeze was essentially a big contribution from the faculty toward the university’s financial health, and having done that, now we’re asked to take a bigger continuing hit in regards to the benefits, so it’s kind of a one-two punch,’ he said.

The most discussed changes to the benefits package include lowering the university’s contribution to faculty retirement benefits from 11 to 9 percent, increasing the cost of medical benefits and adding a co-pay to the use of dependent tuition, which currently allows SU faculty to send their children to SU for free.

Currently, the university contributes 11 percent of faculty members’ salaries to the faculty’s retirement plan. Part of the proposed changes would decrease that contribution to 9 percent, with an additional 1 percent going to a ‘choice dollars’ program that would allow faculty members to decide what they would like to put it toward, said Robert Van Gulick, the Senate Budget Committee’s representative on the working group that helped put together the benefits proposal. The cut to 9 percent would put many senior faculty members at a lower point than faculty at comparable institutions, he said.

‘With these proposed benefit cuts, for some groups of faculty, which includes most faculty who are intermediate or senior level, our retirement benefits would in fact be worse than most of our private competitors,’ he said.

In addition, because SU salaries are lower than those at comparable institutions, the amount the university contributes to retirement is automatically lower even if the rate were comparable, Van Gulick said.

The cost of living in Syracuse must be taken into account when discussing salary comparisons with schools in metropolitan areas like New York City and Boston, Spina said. While comparisons weighted by the cost of living do not bring SU salaries to the top, they do move SU up, he said.

While the cost of living is lower in Syracuse, Van Gulick said other institutions’ faculty who live in metropolitan areas have the added asset of expensive real estate. Real estate values in Syracuse are flat, so SU faculty who want to move after retirement are not making much back on their houses. If professors in metropolitan areas want to move after retirement, the value of their house is more likely to have increased, he said.

‘If the benefits go down, that doesn’t help make up for some of the shortfall in salary,’ he said.

The Working Group on Sustainable Benefits is meeting Monday morning to receive a revised benefits proposal from Chancellor Nancy Cantor, he said. Six University Senate committees will look over the changes and bring their thoughts to a meeting on March 3. The final benefit proposal will be released on March 11.

kronayne@syr.edu

Published on February 21, 2010 at 12:00 pm