The Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) recently released a report entitled A Culture of Entitlement, which purports to analyze the increase of executive salaries versus those of academic staff.  It’s being used as a rallying cry among several faculty unions which are either already (Cape Breton) or about to go (Saint Mary’s) on strike and is very much worth a read even if – as I show below – there are some major problems with the analysis.

Readers with very long-term memories may recall that ANSUT wrote a similar report with the same name about ten years ago, one which was so replete with methodological errors all of which magically happened to reinforce the union’s view that management was over-paid. I called that out as an absolute garbage fire of social science back here.  While the name is the same, the argument has subtly changed.  Last time out, the report tried to make out that Presidents and Vice-Presidents were making out like bandits at an individual level in a way that individual professors were not (most of the difference was because the report adjusted profs’ pay increases for inflation but not administrators’ pay increases, which is, shall we say, “not cricket”).  Now, the argument has changed subtly: it is the aggregate increase in senior administrator pay that is at the centre of this report: that is, it is the number of administrators at issue rather than individual payouts.

Here, from the Executive Summary, is what the report purports to find.

The data show that spending on these positions rose 84% in ten years. Of this, the total spent on presidents’ salaries rose 41% (not including bonuses), spending on vice-presidents’ salaries increased 76%, spending on deans rose 86%, directors and managers rose 88% and 63% respectively, and other positions, such as executive secretaries, university librarians, university counsel, and registrars, rose 119% in the past decade…. Over the period of study, faculty salaries across the province rose an average of 17.5%

I can’t quite replicate ANSUT’s faculty numbers using the Statscan database.  The numbers I get are close enough that it’s not a significant issue either way. By my reckoning, total faculty compensation increased by about 21% , not 17%, and faculty numbers increased by 2%, not 5%, meaning that per faculty compensation increased by a little under 20%, not 17% (all numbers nominal – in real terms, it’s basically flat). 

Now compare this to what ANSUT claims is the situation with administration: an 84% increase in total compensation on a 73% increase in positions, which implies a per administrator compensation increase of about 12% – that is, less than faculty and in fact less than inflation – which kind of undermines the point you’d think ANSUT is trying to make.  But this is one of those situations where you need to pay attention to composition effects: the kinds of positions which “grew” (we’ll get to that in a minute) in the period 2012-2021 were not that well paid compared to Presidents, and so they would tend to bring the average down.  So, let’s see what happens if you disaggregate these categories.

• Presidents (no increase in number).  Aggregate compensation rose by 41% in nominal dollars between 2012 and 2021, though most of this is specifically due to change at just two institutions: Saint Mary’s and Cape Breton.
• Vice-Presidents/Associate VPs (by my count, an increase of 13 positions or 48%, mainly because – unnoted in the report – SMU added a whole whack of AVPs).    Aggregate compensation rose by 76% in nominal dollars, meaning that on a per-VP/AVP amount the rise was about 19%, almost indistinguishable from the rise in pay per faculty.
• Deans of various descriptions (up 17 positions or 36% in numbers, including all the assistant-, associate- and vice-deans).  Here, aggregate compensation rose by 86% in nominal amounts, or a per-Dean rise of about 37%.
• Directors.  Here’s where it starts to get tricky.  The report claims an increase of 63 positions (+66%) at the director level with a total increase of about $7 million in salary (+93%).  That’s over 50% of the entire aggregate salary increase ANSUT is railing about.  But for the most part these aren’t actually new positions: rather, they are just positions that have been upgraded from non-managerial positions to managerial ones.  What this means is that ANSUT is overstating the salary increase here: had things stayed the way they were in 2011, much of this money would have been spent on salaries, anyway, just not on people in positions deemed “managerial.”
• Managers/supervisors.  Now it gets even trickier.  In this category, ANSUT is showing an increase of 99 positions (93%) leading to a total increase in aggregate nominal pay of…63% (in other words, average pay in this category went down by about 16% in pre-inflation dollars).  Again, this doesn’t mean any single person’s pay had fallen, it means that a lot of new individuals have come into the category through various job re-classifications and because they aren’t being paid wild amounts of money, they are dragging down the average.

You begin to see the problem with ANSUT’s whole analysis.  Yes, there is a lot of money newly being spent in positions with a classification of manager and above.  But it’s a very good bet that a huge chunk of this money was previously being spent anyway, just on individuals with different (lower) classifications.  There’s no attempt here to find the “net” extra cost of upwards re-classification. In fairness to ANSUT, calculating the increase in the pay of management is complicated, as the above implies, so it’s not a surprise that ANSUT can’t make a totally convincing case on increasing managerialism.  But on the other hand, no one is forcing ANSUT to make unconvincing claims such as “university leaders” are making “unreasonable gains” based on this data.   Indeed, to arrive at such conclusions on the back of such imperfect information suggests that ANSUT had decided on its findings before it conducted the research.

Were there significant pay hikes for a couple of Nova Scotia Presidents?  Yes.  Did the compensation increase at the decanal level increase ahead of that for faculty?  Yes indeed.  Has there been large-scale re-classification leading to an increase in the number of managerial positions?  You betcha.  But does any of this reflect “entitlement”?  Not really, and there is even less evidence that professors are getting cheated as a result.  Their salaries are up about 1% per year above inflation, and their total numbers are rising even while enrolments in the province are falling. 

No smoking gun here, folks.  Just another stakeholder group with axe to grind.