Salary Increases:

February 2007 issue

At the University SRAC meeting it was announced that there will be a 3% salary increase allocated. It is my understanding that this is applied at the discretion of the department. My department allocates this 3% purely based on merit. Some staff only receive a 1% increase; this is not even cost of living and is severely detrimental to morale. Is there any way to mandate the 3% be applied across the board to everyone as a cost of living increase, regardless of department, and apply merit increases on top of that?

Response

Source: Jeff Bethke
Title: Associate Vice President
Unit/Department: Budget Office and the Office of the EVP
Email: jbethke@depaul.edu

Response: Departments are given the discretion to distribute salary increase pool amounts according to their particular needs, priorities and philosophies of management. This means that in one area the increase pool might be distributed more-or-less evenly among all employees while in another the department might assign a lower standard increase in order to preserve salary dollars for other needs. The Strategic Resource Allocation Committee determines the size of the overall pool (for fiscal year 2007-08, 3% of existing salaries or roughly $7 million in increase salary expense), but departmental managers decide how to best apply those funds within their respective areas.

When considering the overall pool increase amount, SRAC weighs a number of factors including past increase amounts, increase trends at comparable institutions, and historic and projected rates of inflation across the nation and here locally in Chicago. The general intent when setting annual increase pool amounts is to (1) enable the university to offer annual adjustments that, on a cumulative basis, keep pace with or surpass the costs of living and (2) try to avoid impulsive responses to short-term macro-economic factors resulting in radical swings in increase amounts from year to year. The idea behind this second point is that, as long as the cumulative average is keeping pace with the overall market, it is better to increase the pool at a steady, relatively predictable rate, such as around 3% per year, instead of offering a bigger increase one year, such as 5%, followed by a much smaller increase, like 1%, the next.

One of SRAC’s most difficult tasks is to balance the natural desire to offer larger increases with the reality of what is possible given the university’s other expenses and competing priorities. While, at a personal level, most of us would enthusiastically endorse the idea of bigger salary pool increases, we must keep in mind that doing so could lead the university to make unhealthy cuts in worthwhile programs and services and/or require us to more aggressively increase tuition rates. The size of the salary adjustment pool must be balanced with the necessary goal of continuing to offer a high-quality, accessible education to the students we serve.