Inside Higher Ed: The Seniority Pay Cut
To get a good raise, do you need to quit?
That may well be the case at many colleges that are suffering from salary compression and salary inversion — situations where those hired most recently are paid disproportionately more or flat out more than those with more experience. The issue is attracting the attention not only of faculty leaders, but of college administrators, who fear that these salary gaps discourage talented faculty members from staying at an institution.
On Tuesday, at the annual meeting of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, some college officials and experts shared their takes on the issue, and strategies for eliminating these “anomalies” in what people are paid.
The most striking example was offered by Mark Preble, assistant vice chancellor for human resources at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He did an analysis last year of the salaries of all assistant professors. He found that those hired in 2007 – who hadn’t been there long enough to have received raises — earned more on average than those hired in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006. The starting salary has gone up by so much, he said, that those not on the market are effectively punished for not moving. Indeed those hired that year were earning about $10,000 more a year than those hired five years before.
“It pays to quit,” he said.
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