A couple of weeks ago we had a fun look at academic salaries. And I know some of you were thinking: “Why pick on profs? What about skyrocketing administrative salaries?” Fair enough – let’s look at what happened to administrative pay in the last decade.

To stay consistent with earlier data on professors’ salaries, I use 2001 and 2009 as reference years. This being a free email, I stick to easily-accessible, cost-free data – namely, salary disclosure information from the Government of Ontario. Since Ontario is 1/3 of the country and previous work has shown their academic salary increases to be very close to the national average, I believe it to be reasonably representative of the country as a whole.

Across the 18 universities for which there are data for both years, average presidential salaries rose by 56%, from $214,563 to $335,617. That’s higher than the 43% average pay raise for full professors over the same period, but it’s a matter of degrees rather than orders of magnitude. It’s also marginally less than the 63% average increase in Ontario college presidents’ salaries. There were, however, big variations within this group – presidential salaries more than doubled at Ottawa, Laurentian and McMaster, but rose only 5% at the University of Toronto.

Comparative Salary Rises in Ontario – 2001-2009

Another common complaint about administrative bloat is the increase in the number of vice-presidential positions. By my count, in Ontario in 2001 there were 93 vice-presidential positions, including AVPs of various stripes. By 2009, that number had increased to – brace yourself – 193.

That’s not a misprint. It looks a little bit better in comparison when one remembers that Ontario academic staff numbers also grew by 28% in that same period – but not much.

That said, these jobs aren’t springing out of thin air. Usually, they existed previously in some form or another, but with lesser names. Basically, having the letters “V” and “P” in a title is just something universities do when a management position starts costing over $135,000/year. Thus, a newly-created AVP, government relations, with pay of $150,000 isn’t $150,000 in new salary, it’s a title upgrade from “director” and a $50,000 bump in salary.

So,is there runaway growth in presidential salaries? They’ve certainly grown faster than professors’ salaries, but it’s a matter of degrees; the growth is 6% per year compared to 4.6%. Is there runaway growth in administration? Harder to tell. There’s definitely been runaway inflation in titles – if there were a Central Bank for job titles in universities, the governor would be looking for work in Zimbabwe – but the net effect on salary mass is unclear.

A One Thought for another day, perhaps.

So what, if anything, can we conclude from all this salary data we’ve been looking at over the past three days?

There are really three issues at play. The first has to do with average salaries – does it make sense that, on average, our professors are essentially the best paid in the world? Well, there’s no reason to begrudge paying top dollar for top talent. If Canadian professors were – collectively – considered to be the best in the world, this would make sense. The problem is that nobody’s sure if this is the case. Are they good? Sure. The best? That’s not so clear.

The second is the salary structure of the profession as a whole. The progression in pay from assistant professor to full professor is much less steep in Canada than in the U.S .or the U.K. It’s not clear why this is so. One possible suspect is unionization. Another is that the rank of full professor is handed out more freely here than elsewhere (36% of professors are considered “full” in Canada, compared to 27% in the U.S. and 12% in the U.K.), and top salaries cannot rise as high when so many people are eligible for them. Whatever the cause, the consequences are serious: despite having enormous resources devoted to compensation, Canadian universities are genuinely at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the very top professors. At the moment, the only way to compete for top talent would be to give massive pay rises across the board, and that simply isn’t on.

The third is the issue of “what have you done for us lately.” Much of the rise in academic salaries is the result of recent increases in provincial funding. For obvious reasons, when governments handed that money over to institutions no one said: “let’s use this cash to make Canadian academics the most highly-paid in the world!” Rather, universities said things like “we’ll use this money to hire the best professors in the world!” However, not only do we have no idea if actually they did this – have we been hiring proportionately more foreign professors lately, or are we fishing in the same old pool? – but much of the money inevitably ended up with incumbent employees who got paid more for doing exactly what they were doing before.

Whether or not you think academics “deserve” their current levels of pay, the fact is that some recent increases can look a lot like unearned windfall gains. Now that governments are cutting funding, it’s reasonable to expect people to point that out more frequently. It could get ugly.

– Updated: 8:50 a.m.

Anybody want to keep going on this comparison business? It gets tougher as you move further away from Canada and the North American systems of Academic rank, but why not?

Let’s start with the U.K. Data on salaries is published annually in the Times Higher Education Supplement, which divides the data into two categories: “professors” and “not professors.” The first term is basically analogous to our “full professors” (though we bestow that rank on a third of our academic staff, compared to about 12% in the UK), while the latter is a combination of terms like lecturer, reader, etc., which are similar to our “associate” and “assistant” professorships, but also include some other non-tenure-track ranks as well. That means the latter figures may be a bit on the low side for the UK.

Enough caveats: here’s the comparison for 2009-2010, with 1 GBP = $1.68 CAD.

Academic Salaries, Canada vs. U.K., 2009-10

That’s a 10% gap at the full professor level, and a 40% gap among other academic ranks. We need to adjust that picture a bit: “professor” in the U.K. is the top 12% of staff, and in Canada the top 36% – if we did apples to apples, the gap would certainly be bigger, and as noted above, there’s some reason to believe that the gap actually might not be as large at the non-professor level. Overall, the gap is likely to be in the range of 20-30%.

What about other countries? Well, in 2008 higher ed uber-guru Phil Altbach and his Boston College colleagues published an excellent survey of academic salaries around the world, and they came up with the following:

Average Academic Salaries, 2005-06, in WB $PPP

Saudi Arabia tops the list primarily because of the extraordinary salaries paid to their very top faculty – frequently foreigners – who require a bit of a top-up to remain in the Kingdom. If you look at entry-level faculty, the story changes a bit.

Salaries for Entry-Level faculty, 2005-06 in $WB PPP

What distinguishes Canada from other countries is the very high level of its base rate of academic pay. I’d argue this is pretty clearly an effect of high levels of unionization in Canada: our universities simply don’t pay heavily for progression through the ranks the way the U.S., U.K., China and Saudi Arabia do. The premium for reaching the top rung is a lot higher elsewhere, which is why you still hear university presidents complaining about the difficulty of attracting top talent despite such high average wages.

Maybe flat salary scales are the right policy choice for Canada, I don’t know. It would be interesting to have an open debate about it, though.