RD157 - Faculty Salary Peer Group - July 2011


Executive Summary:
The 2011 Acts of Assembly, Chapter 890, Item 139.P.1, directs the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) to review, and if necessary, update institutional peer groups giving consideration to:

(1) the impact of cost-of-living indices on the current cohort of peer institutions for public colleges and universities that currently receive a state-approved cost-of-living adjustment or

(2) public colleges and universities where the impact of enrollment patterns resulted in the percentage of graduate degrees conferred increasing by more than 10 percentage points between 1997 and 2007 concurrent with a like decrease in the percentage of undergraduate degrees conferred during the same period.

Virginia has been using national peers as benchmarks to evaluate the competitiveness of faculty salaries at Virginia’s public institutions for more than 20 years. The General Assembly is committed to striving toward the goal that the average salary for teaching and research (T&R) faculty at Virginia public institutions be at the 60th percentile of their national peers. In 1987 the General Assembly directed SCHEV to work with representatives from the money committees, the Department of Planning and Budget, the Secretary of Education, and institutions to develop national peers for each of the public colleges and universities in an effort to determine appropriate faculty salaries at Virginia institutions. The peer group process is composed of three phases: 1) data identification and collection, (2) statistical modeling, and (3) institutional meetings. The first two phases are quantitative in nature. The third phase is to select peers and allow institutions to present their particular interest and focus, something that the statistical modeling is not able to adequately address. The system-wide peer group selection and revision has been conducted three times – 1987, 1997, and 2007.

In order to accomplish the 2011 legislative directive, SCHEV staff had a preparatory meeting with representatives from the House Appropriations Committee, Senate Finance Committee, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Finance, and the Department of Planning and Budget (Richmond group) in March. The meeting was to identify institutions that would qualify for peer review and update, the data to be used and the process methodology. It was agreed to use the cluster analysis results generated for the system-wide peer group revision in 2007 as the base data. The intent was to be fair to institutions that were not selected for peer review in this study and to exclude any changes since 2007. It was also agreed that the selected institutions should make proposals and provide justifications to the Richmond group for consideration in order to reach an agreement on the peer group update.