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Tag: Salaries

Progression Through the Ranks (PTR)

So, here’s the little budget secret that everyone in higher education tries to hide: it’s called Progression Through the Ranks (PTR).  That’s the name given to the automatic raise professors and librarians get every year, simply based on seniority.  And over the next few years, as we head into genuine zero-budget-increase territory, it’s going to significantly erode institutional purchasing capacity. Come collective bargaining time, unions and administrations seem to go at it hammer-and-tongs.  “We demand a 2.5% annual pay increase!”  “No,

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May 29, 2013 1 Comment

The Effects of Freezing Administrative Salaries

I see that the University of Regina council has voted to freeze both administrative salaries and the growth of administrative positions, a recurrence of an ongoing meme which blames those hated administrators for the rising cost of education.  Because Regina’s administrative practices are relatively typical of Canadian universities, I thought I would test-drive this idea: how much have administrative salaries increased, and how much wiggle room would such a freeze provide? (Full disclosure: In 2010 and 2011, HESA was contracted

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March 11, 2013 4 Comments

A Revolution in Faculty Bargaining?

Earlier this week, I was riffing on how to make good salary comparisons when I came across a faculty union which has been doing just that. The faculty union at the University of Victoria is feeling a bit aggrieved that its members’ pay is lower than at comparable universities.  When I first saw their numbers, I was a bit skeptical: UVic went through a significant generational shift nine or ten years ago, so their age/rank profile might potentially account for some of

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February 15, 2013 6 Comments

If University Presidents had a Union

It occurred to me while writing that last piece about salary comparisons: what if University Presidents used the same set of arguments about salary that professors do?  What if we set their salaries as a function of what a comparator set of institutions were paying? For this exercise, I have compared the presidential salaries at each of the top eight Canadian institutions in the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities to those at the nearest comparator institutions among public universities

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February 13, 2013 1 Comment

How to Compare Salaries

One of the things that keeps popping up in labour relations is the salary comparison: a union at one institution says, “we deserve what professors at the University of X get”.  It’s a reasonable tactic, but making useful and accurate comparisons at the institutional level is much harder than it looks, and one needs to be alert to the possibility of cherry-picking comparisons. Academic salaries in Canada are, for the most part, based on three things: rank, years of service,

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February 12, 2013 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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