Spotlight

Raising Faculty Salaries at Pomona and Harvey Mudd

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person It's Not a Zero-Sum Game Are a moderately heavy teaching load and an active research program mutually exclusive? First Person Pothead Ph.D. This is most definitely not a cautionary tale. First Person Subject Experts Need Not Apply Recent job postings and hires suggest that many academic libraries are losing interest in hiring humanities Ph.D.'s. Career News When Laptops Disappear Stolen computers containing sensitive data are a growing and costly problem for colleges. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Jennifer Jacobson

If you're a full professor at Pomona College or Harvey Mudd College, chances are the economy hasn't gotten you down this year.

That's because in the latest ranking of the salaries of full professors at liberal-arts colleges, Pomona jumped into 1st place (from 5th) and Harvey Mudd moved into 4th (from 13th) -- bypassing some of the top East Coast colleges that usually dominate the list.

According to an annual salary survey released last month by the American Association of University Professors, the average salary of a full professor at Pomona is $109,700 this academic year, up from $101,700 in 2001-2. At Harvey Mudd, the average is $106,600 this year, up from $97,600. At their sister institution, Claremont McKenna College, the average salary of a full professor rose only modestly this year, to $104,800 from $102,000 for 2001-2, and its ranking on the list of highest-paid full professors at liberal-arts colleges actually fell slightly (from fourth to seventh) because of the other two colleges' significant jumps.

As a slow economy continues to diminish campus budgets and erode endowments, how have Pomona and Harvey Mudd managed to overtake campuses that usually sit at the top of the list, such as Amherst and Williams Colleges?

At Pomona, the administration decided to spend more on faculty salaries this year -- a move that has, not surprisingly, boosted faculty morale -- to keep pace with its peer institutions.

"We recognized from comparable data that we were beginning to lag behind in our salaries," said Gary R. Kates, Pomona's vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. Asked if Pomona had lost faculty members for that reason, he says, "You never know when people leave how much salary is a factor." And "you never quite know why a No. 1 candidate will go elsewhere and not select you. You certainly don't want compensation to be the reason."

At the behest of Peter W. Stanley, the college's president, the Board of Trustees adopted a plan to raise faculty salaries at all ranks. Rather than an across-the-board percentage, the raises were awarded based on merit. The average salary of an associate professor at Pomona rose to $75,900 this year, up from $71,000, assistant professors there now earn an average of $56,900, up from $54,700 in 2001-2.

"In general, Pomona faculty feel like they are paid pretty well," says Michael K. Kuehlwein, a professor of economics and chairman of the Faculty Executive Committee. "I haven't heard many people complain about compensation. And even though the cost of living is high, the college has a pretty generous housing assistance plan, which makes it possible for professors to buy houses in Claremont, so that helps a lot."

Bumped from the top slot down to third place in the survey was Swarthmore, where full professors earned an average salary of $107,400 this year; associate professors, $74,600; and assistant professors, $58,200. Swarthmore officials, though, don't seem especially concerned. "While we aim to keep faculty salaries competitive, we don't pay especially close attention to one school's movement on a particular list; nor do we have any particular reaction to such movements," says Tom Krattenmaker, a spokesman for the college.

Professors at Swarthmore do not seem particularly upset either. Charles L. James, chairman of Swarthmore's English department, said he had not heard that Swarthmore had lost the top spot on the best-paid list. Asked if professors are dissatisfied with compensation at the college, he says, "I don't hear rumblings of that sort."

Situated in Claremont, Calif., just 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, Pomona is in one of the wealthiest areas of the country, Mr. Kates says. The increase in faculty salaries was partly to help professors keep pace with the high cost of living in the region, he says.

It was also to reward them for hard work. "We ask an enormous amount of our faculty," Mr. Kates says. "In addition to being outstanding teachers in the classroom, we ask them to have ongoing, regular scholarship," which means "they have to be in two worlds at once -- to be in the world of a teaching college but play in the league of a research university. We're compensating them for these difficult activities together."

And unlike many colleges, Pomona actually has the money to do so. Since the economy started to sour nearly three years ago, the value of the college's endowment has fallen by only 7 or 8 percent, to $1.02-billion in 2002, from $1.1-billion in 2000, says Mark G. Wood, a spokesman for the college, while many other institutions saw far more significant declines.

"We actually listened to our investment advisers," Mr. Kates says. "When the market was very high, they told us to get out of venture capital. ... We got out of [it] at the right time, and we invested in safer things."

Pomona was also very conservative in how it used its endowment growth in the mid- to late '90s. "We did not put new endowment dollars into the operating budget," he says. "So we didn't hire more staff and create more offices or more departments. We either put it back in the endowment or used it for special one-time projects, for example, resodding the football field or building a building." As a result, he says, the college doesn't have an operating budget much larger than before.

Next year, salary increases at the ranks of full and associate professors will be more modest at Pomona because "we think we've made the great leap we wanted," Mr. Kates says. And although he declines to provide specific numbers, he says that pay raises for assistant professors in 2003-4 will be "more than modest."

Compared with Pomona and Harvey Mudd, professors at Claremont McKenna saw only modest gains in their salaries for full and associate professors, with the average salary at the associate rank rising only slightly, to $68,600 this year, from $67,300. Assistant professors fared somewhat better, with an average salary of $54,900, up from $51,200 last year.

"The salary increases each year reflect what's happening to the overall budget," says William Ascher, vice president and dean of the faculty at Claremont McKenna. "The Pomona endowment has done better over the past couple years than ours has." Claremont McKenna's endowment has fallen in value, from $487-million in 2000 to $292-million in 2002, says Evie Lazzarino, a college spokeswoman.

The college, which increased its average salaries just above the rate of inflation, tends to have high average faculty salaries anyway compared with most liberal-arts colleges because it emphasizes public affairs, business, and the professions and employs many economists, who tend to earn more than people in the humanities.

Harvey Mudd, meanwhile, increased its faculty salary pool by 5 percent, and, in addition, set aside an extra $125,000 to raise the salaries of full professors, says F. Sheldon Wettack, vice president and dean of the faculty. "We were able to do it by just making sure we budgeted elsewhere," he says. For example, "we didn't increase operating budgets for departments," and "for the last several years we've been holding the increases to 1 or 2 percent every year, and some years at 0 percent."

Here, too, the administration decided to make the investment after "we found ourselves falling behind a group of schools that we didn't really want to fall behind," Mr. Wettack says. And like Pomona, the pay raises were based on merit, and not an across-the-board increase.

Typically, the college compares itself to places like the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, which share Harvey Mudd's focus on engineering, computer science, and mathematics. Among those institutions, the college usually ranks third, fourth, or fifth every year when it comes to average faculty salaries, he says.

But, he says, "we started looking about four or five years ago at a group of liberal-arts colleges we wanted to be compared to -- Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Pomona," he says. "When we started looking at that group we discovered if you went back 8 or 10 years to salaries at the full-professor rank, we've gradually fallen behind." So the college allocated more money to faculty salaries to try to bring itself more in line.

"You want to make sure you attract people coming in the door [to make them see] that your salaries are competitive at the upper ranks," Mr. Wettack says. There's "also a desire to keep faculty at the upper ranks feeling good about their situation."

Harvey Mudd, he says, was able to do this because its endowment was not hit as hard as some others. Three years ago the endowment stood at nearly $160-million, then rose to $168-million two years ago, and dropped back to $160-million last year, says Randy M. Ringen, a college spokesman. Figures for this fiscal year, he says, are not yet available.

For 2003-4, he says, the administration plans to increase its faculty salary pool, which totals nearly $7-million, by 5 percent, "but there will not be the special adjustment for full professors."

Mr. Wettack cautions that the pay raises may not always be as generous. "All of us, Pomona included, even though they have a much larger endowment than we do, are looking at budget years more difficult than in the past," he says. "Who knows whether we'll sustain that kind of salary increase? The years ahead are going to be challenging."