Thoughts on the labor situation at UIS

 Five years ago the faculty at my university went on strike, and we have just voted this past week to approve a strike again this year.  That doesn’t mean we will certainly go on strike; it means that ten days after we file an intent to strike, we may choose to do so.  So, on May 2nd or thereafter, we could go on strike

There were 139 faculty in my bargaining unit back in September, but two of us have passed away, and three have retired, so currently there are 134 of us remaining. My guess is that about 120 of us would be either marching around striking or else at least refraining from crossing the picket line. I suppose about 14 of my colleagues would work in defiance of a strike, but I might be too pessimistic about that. 

The intent to strike reflects several things.

1. We have been bargaining for over 13 months.  I’ve attended the last seven or eight bargaining sessions. In the past two or three bargaining sessions I saw things happening, but in the first four or five sessions the pace was very slow.  I can’t imagine what it was like in the 18+ bargaining sessions back in 2021 before I started attending. Anyway, impatience and frustration are feeding the dissatisfaction that prompted our faculty to vote to strike.
2. Our faculty feel that our university is neglected by the larger university system of which we are a part.  That is, our Board of Trustees uses a formula to send some of state’s appropriation to the U of I system that perpetuates inequality, and should revise that formula. In essence, our faculty earn less because we teach students who are more likely to be from households with modest incomes, and our students have a high percentage (relative to UIUC) who are first-generation college students, African-American, Hispanic (although UIC has a far greater percentage Hispanic than we do), and veterans. We think this unconsciously pushes the board to undervalue our university, underpay our faculty, and generally exclude us from benefiting from system-wide assets. 
3. We think the administration can come up with the money pay us what we want to be paid. We believe the administration at the System level and the campus level have the power to stop or slow the rate of decline in enrollments, possibly modestly increase enrollments—at least in the next couple years, raise more revenue from tuition, allocate a fair share of state allocations to our campus, trim salaries and staff position costs in non-teaching areas, and work more effectively in convincing the state government to provide more funding. We do not expect revenue increases to keep up with inflation, but we expect that revenue increases can come close to that target over a three-to-five year period.
4. We believe the administration at the System level and campus level could invest more in the core mission of our campus, and reduce some of the other costs.
5. We believe it is fair and appropriate and possible for the U of I System and our campus to plan out payments to us that would, by the final year of a five-year contract (in 2025-2026), have faculty receive compensation that would be at approximately the same level we had in 2020-2021 in inflation-adjusted dollars. 
6. We are also interested in striking because of the way the university has been responding (or not responding at all) to our proposals.  Not just compensation proposals, but on matters related to workload, parking, and other matters, we have not been pleased with how the University responds.
7. We think that threatening to strike, or actually striking, will get us a better contract.  And, we are so angry at our administration, that even if the cost of striking (we assume that we will lose our pay for the days we strike) exceeds the increases we could get through striking, we want to express our strong negative emotions against the administration.

Entry to PAC on the UIS campus

The vote to strike, the threat to strike, and the possible strike that may come, are all mainly done to speed up the process, and push the administration to make some reasonable concessions.  We would like them to pick up the pace so that we can exchange proposals and counter-proposals going back and forth between our bargaining teams every few days, rather than waiting weeks or months to get responses.

The state of Illinois claims that public Universities are supposed to support various public goals.  We want to produce an educated workforce that will make Illinois attractive to employers, and we want to produce nurses, school teachers, social workers, public administrators, accountants, business managers and executives, scientists, medical workers, and doctors to meet the needs of the public and the state.  We also want to create opportunities for persons who have been historically excluded from higher education and the middle class to gain access to American prosperity.  That is, we especially want to take bright and hard-working persons from working-class or impoverished backgrounds, and persons who are African-American, Hispanic, Native American, and so forth, and give them a high quality education at a low price so that they will enter the middle class without having a burden of extremely high student debt. 

If you examine research on the incomes and the financial need of students who attend UIS and compare that to UIC and UIUC, you will find that in most respects, our campus is doing that second part, and giving a very affordable high-quality education to our students, and our students include a greater number of persons who are in those groups where their grandparents and ancestors were likely to have been excluded from many benefits of public investment. If you look at UIUC, you will see that they mainly draw from a population where the parents are better educated and enjoy higher salaries. They are more selective, and students who can afford to attend private schools, or get coaching and tutoring on standardized tests, or do interesting extracurricular activities instead of working to help bring in extra income to their households are more likely to be able to choose UIUC.  That’s how it is at flagship Universities and the selective private universities. Regional teaching-oriented universities do attract students from advantaged backgrounds. We’re convenient, and in the case of UIS, the quality of teaching in many classes is equal-to or superior to what students might get at an expensive private school or in Urbana-Champaign. Some students just want to stay away from the massive major campuses, and prefer a more personalized experience, especially in their undergraduate studies. But, the point is, schools such as UIS have more students who are lower in social-economic status compared to the students at the flagship schools, and for elite persons serving on Boards of Trustees or in the Executive levels of System administration, this tends to feed a bias against the students and staff at regional schools. 

So, when the state of Illinois hands out its public subsidy to higher education, the students at UIC and UIS ought to be getting more than UIUC.  They will get more financial support such as the state’s grants to low-income Illinois residents, but also when it comes to the subsidies that go to the campuses, the spending per student ought to reflect a formula that considers typical household incomes, proportion of the students getting veteran benefits, and perhaps also the percentage of students whose ancestors were blocked from accumulating assets for many generations when our nation blatantly excluded some people from schemes of public investment and support (e.g., persons who are African-Americans). 

It is possible to calculate how the state invests its public higher education budget on a per-student basis by examining the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s website to see the most recent Full-Time-Equivalent (FTE) enrollments at the 12 public universities (9 universities, but U of I has three universities and Southern Illinois has two, if we exclude hospitals and medical schools, which are things apart from typical universities).  Looking at that ratio of funding per student, you can find that over recent years the U of I Board of Trustees has been passing on about $5,900 to $6,100 per student to UIS, and a figure of $6,000 per FTE student is almost exactly right for the most recent allocation (UIC gets about $6,020, and UIUC gets about $4,560).  The state spends more on UIS and UIC students than UIUC, but I’ve just explained why the spending-per student at UIS should be compared to schools more like the regionals, Northeastern, Northern, Western, Eastern, and Governors State. The  FY 2021 state fiscal allocation to those campuses per FTE student are: Northeastern, $7,610; Northern, $6,390; Western, $7,960; Eastern, $6080; and Governors State, $7,200.  If the U of I System invested the state’s money in our campus at a rate of $6,500 per FTE student (rather than $6,000), that would bring in about $1.5 million more revenue to our campus each year.  An increase of $1.5 million in revenue distributed to our campus presents a shift of 00.329% of the $456 million in state revenue distributed to the campuses.  So, if the U of I System sent 4.35% of its $456 million unrestricted state subsidy to UIS instead of the 4.02% it sends now, that would give our campus $1.5 million more. 

Let me say a little more about the University of Illinois budget. The University of Illinois is a massive system, with about $2.5 billion in general operating revenue each year. But, if you include all the restricted funds (housing fees that can only be used for housing, research grants that must be used for research, money generated for the hospital that can only be used in the hospital, etc.) it’s a $7.2 billion organization in terms of the total system budget. Within this system, about $622 million is given by the state government (through the Illinois Board of Higher Education according to the budget passed by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor) toward general education on the three campuses. The state also gives students grants, and those are paid to the universities in our system, but we’ll just look at the award of the direct appropriation. Of that $622 million, about $456 million is totally unrestricted and goes to the campuses, where it can be used for anything. Of that $456 million, about $235 million goes to the UIUC (Urbana-Champaign), about $203 million goes to the UIC (Chicago), and about $18.4 million went to Springfield this fiscal year.

However, in addition the $622 million appropriated for FY 2022, earlier in April of 2022, when the state passed its fiscal year 2023 budget, an additional $29 million was given to the University of Illinois system for this fiscal year (FY 2022).  Will the UIS get any of that?  The UIS got 2.9% of the $622 million initially given for this fiscal year (4.0% of the completely unrestricted funding).  If we are given 2.9% of that supplemental FY 2022 allocation from the state, it would bring in over $850,000 to our campus to use this fiscal year.  Considering how hard faculty have worked during the Pandemic to switch to online instruction, and now give instruction in combined formats of classroom and online, and considering recent high inflation, we would like some of that to be awarded to faculty.

Another problem is that UIS has a “structural deficit” with the University of Illinois system.  That means that expenditures at UIS are greater than revenues, so the University of Illinois system lends money to UIS, and UIS pays this back.  This repayment to the University of Illinois System from UIS is seen by many UIS faculty as a way for the “middle class and upper class mainly white campus” of UIUC to extract resources from the “higher proportion of veterans, African-Americans, and working class student campus” of UIS.  The University of Illinois System could wipe out the so-called “debt” owed to the System by UIS, and could do so with some of the supplemental $29 million received this year. Our strike will hopefully bring attention to this matter.

Let’s next consider enrollment.  Faculty have some responsibility when it comes to graduate student enrollment.  When someone is interested in a graduate program at UIS, faculty generally need to follow up with e-mails, phone calls, or meetings to explain the graduate program and assess whether a potential student would likely succeed in the program.  The Admissions Office and the Marketing Department and Financial Aid Department have important roles to play, and there may be an academic professional who does much of the explaining to prospective students, but faculty do have an important task related to recruitment and admissions in graduate programs.  When I was the chair of a department with a modest graduate program, I would say the communications with prospective students could take from two hours a week to eight hours a week, depending upon the time of year.  The administration of my college decided that program would be okay if no faculty had the responsibility of caring for recruitment of graduate students, and I left that department, and was not replaced. The lack of any faculty in that graduate program caused an enrollment crash, and the department is now being phased out of existence.  It used to bring in about 15 to 25 graduate students a year, and the administrators decided the program was too small, and could be handled without any cost-centered faculty in the department. They were wrong.

Although faculty do have some role in recruiting graduate students, most of the marketing, recruitment, and admissions work for graduate programs needs to be handled by skilled non-teaching staff in the university’s marketing department, admissions department, and financial aid.  Colleges also need academic professionals who help with the inquiries from potential students. One reason we faculty are upset at the university administration is that we feel that the administration has failed to employ an adequate number of skilled persons in marketing, admissions, financial aid, and also academic professionals in our colleges. This harms enrollment, and does far more harm than anything faculty could do to correct the situation.  Also, the administration has successfully pushed several graduate programs to close on our campus. These were programs that faculty wanted to keep, but the administrators did not want them, so they were closed. I do not believe any of those graduate programs were losing money.  When faculty pointed out that the tuition and fee revenues generated by the programs exceeded the portion of faculty salaries devoted to teaching and mentoring in those programs, this information was dismissed and ignored. Whenever the administration complains about declining graduate enrollments, the faculty remember this.

Looking out the (dirty) windows of Brookens toward PAC

Another problem at UIS was the fact that from about 2011 to 2017 there was a boom in international student enrollment, but this was followed by a bust. This enrollment was mainly in the computer science department and the accountancy department, although there were generally many graduate students from India and China coming into other programs in the business college. Changes in the mood in the USA, changes in student visa policies, changes in visa policies for persons with demanded skills, and changes in public health policies (the 2020-2022 Pandemic) popped this bubble of high international graduate student enrollment. During the peak of the boom, in 2015 and 2016, there was investment in non-teaching staff, but only modest investment in faculty in computer science and the business college. One budget problem faculty believe faces UIS is that we built up a non-teaching infrastructure to help with the high international graduate student numbers we had around 2012-2016, but now that revenue has deflated, and the administration has not adequately considered how to build back up the numbers of graduate students.

Faculty at UIS are frustrated because they know they are underpaid.  We suspect that one of several contributing factors to our being underpaid is that our campus is somewhat too “top-heavy” and we have, on our campus, allocated slightly too much to some non-core activities and administrative leaders, and this has contributed somewhat to low faculty pay.

First, how do we know faculty are underpaid?  We can compare ourselves to similar schools, look at our salaries, and see than we generally earn less than others.  At UIS our full professors (there are not many of them) tend to be paid at rates similar to averages at comparable schools, and the faculty in our business college, on average, also earn slightly higher salaries than business faculty at comparable schools, but most of our departments, and certainly our junior and mid-career faculty (assistant professors, associate professors, and even the lecturers and adjuncts who are outside our bargaining unit) are paid too little.  

We can compare our salaries to state averages at public universities.  We assume that state averages should, in general, be a bit higher than our salaries. There are many reasons for this.  Many public universities are near Chicago, and the cost-of-living in Chicago is 15% to 20% higher than in Springfield. Faculty at major research universities (SIU-Carbondale; ISU, UIUC, and UIC are research universities) tend to earn more than those in comprehensive and teaching-oriented universities.  Faculty at community colleges in Illinois tend to be paid well, as their salaries depend mostly on property taxes, which in Illinois are a major source of public revenue, whereas faculty at the 12 public universities depend more on total state revenue, which is more dependent on income and sales taxes and the instability of state politics. Still, even if we accept that our salaries might be equitable if we were paid 8% or 10% below state averages, we are even below that in most departments.  

At UIS, our biology and chemistry professors earn more than 25% below state averages for public post-secondary instructors in their fields.  Political Science, Environmental Science, and Communications professors also earn more than 20% below state averages for faculty in their respective disciplines. Psychology faculty are right at 20% below state averages in psychology.  Our history faculty earn about 17% less than average for public history faculty in the state, despite the fact that two of our fairly well-paid Lincoln scholars are in that department. Our English, philosophy, and math professors are all below 90% of state averages. We can also compare average faculty salaries at our campus to the 19 public universities considered peer institutions by either/both of the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Faculty salaries are published on a government websites, and we have determined that our faculty have average salaries about $4,000 below the average faculty salaries at the 20 schools in our comparison groups. 

We can compare our salaries to the average salaries for K-12 teachers in Illinois, and our colleagues down the road at Lincoln Land Community College.  The median salary for our bargaining unit is below the state average for K-12 teachers in Illinois, and we earn many thousands of dollars less than our colleagues in Lincoln Land Community College. Incidentally, K-12 teachers have widely varying salaries, depending upon how long they have been working and in which school district they are working. The lowest paid full-time tenure-track member of the bargaining unit is paid $47,620, which is well above the state mandated minimum for school teachers is a bit more than $10,000 lower than that, but in the local Springfield school district new school teachers tend to earn $39,000 to $45,000, and the average salary for teachers in District 186 (Springfield) is $65,889.   As of September of this year, 44 of the 135 faculty (that’s nearly a third of us) who were in our bargaining unit as of January 2022 earned less than $65,000 per year.  Another 41 of us (30%) earn between $65,000 and $75,000. That is, 63% of the faculty in our bargaining unit earn less than $75,000 per year. 

We can also compare our faculty salaries to the salaries of administrators at UIS.  Looking at the salaries of 20 faculty who were in the same rank back in 2010 as they were at the start of this academic year, we can see that their salaries increased by 28.3% over those dozen years, but when you control for inflation, their salaries actually dropped by 2.6%.  You can then compare those faculty salaries to a set of the 25 top administrative positions at UIS, and see what persons in those positions were paid in 2010, and compare it to the salaries for persons in those positions now. That shows that these administrative position salaries increased by 37.1%, and after adjusting for inflation, they increased by 4.2%.  So, the faculty, who think they are underpaid, have seen inflation-adjusted pay decreases of 2.6% over the past 12 years, and administrative leadership at UIS has had their real inflation-adjusted pay increase by 4.2%. Not all administrative positions have seen pay increases.  The person in charge of IT on campus has had an inflation-adjusted decrease of 10.8% since 2010, and In 2022 the position of director of admissions had a salary that was 7.7% lower than the salary of the person who was in that position in 2010, after controlling for inflation.  Perhaps we need to put more money into admissions and recruitment and faculty, and trim some of the money going to administration. We don't mean huge changes. Something along the order of a few percent more to us. It just seems fair.  

The amount of money we are suggesting we should be paid is a reasonable amount. Using reasonable forecasts of likely inflation, the amount of compensation we are requesting now would get us to about 105% of where our salaries were in August of 2020 (using inflation-adjusted dollars) by 2025.  If you total all the compensation costs for our salaries over the five years of the contract with what we are proposing, and adjust each year for inflation (use constant 2020 dollars using a variety of reasonable inflation models), the total cost to the university accumulated over the five years of the contract we are proposing would be a net decrease in labor cost of over $1 million (compared to just paying us exactly what we were paid in 2020-21 in inflation-adjusted dollars, keeping our salaries unchanged by perfectly matching inflation).  That is, although we would see increases in “current dollar” compensation each year, so that labor costs of our bargaining unit would cost the U of I a little over $9.15 million over five years more than what it would cost the University to freeze our wages at salaries we were paid in 2020-21, when you adjust for increases in cost of living and the deflating value of the dollar, the U of I System actually will be paying us less over those five years.  

By the way, our salary increase in current dollars would bring our salaries up to about 130.5% of what we earned in 2020-21 (not adjusting for inflation), and the university management’s proposal now would raise our salaries up to 118.6% by the same metric.  The Chancellor recently sent out an e-mail that did not have the same figures, but her point is correct, that we are asking for more than the university is offering.  Keep in mind that right now to have our salaries match what we were paid two years ago, we would need to be paid 113.6% more than what our salaries were two years ago, due to inflation. Just reporting current dollar amounts without adjusting for inflation is an inadequate way to examine the question.

What are reasonable inflation forecasts?  Well, we already know what inflation was in the year before this contract started: depending on which summer month you pick and which adjusted consumer-price-index you use, inflation was around 5.1% to 5.4% leading up to our first year (this year).  This year the inflation rate is certain to be close to 8%.  What will it be next year, or in the next two years that follow?  This is an important question, since we are intending to get a five year contract.  We analyze our offers and the counters offered by management using three inflation models.  Both start us with the 5.2% and 8% we’ve already experienced preceding years one and two of our contract, and then we have an optimistic model that runs 4%, 2%, 1% in the subsequent years.  A middle-range that runs 4.5%, 2.24%, and 2.24% in subsequent years, assuming that the last two years match the historical average between 2006 and 2020.  We also have a pessimistic scenario that runs 5%, 3%, and 2.24%.  In every case, we look at what our inflation-adjusted incomes would be in the final year of a five-year contract (2025-26) and determine that our inflation-adjusted incomes would be above what we earned in 2020-21.

Our initial offer suggested that our pay increase should be 0.25% plus the inflation rate of the previous year, and then on top of that there would be additional money distributed according to a formula to make pay more equitable on our campus.  It’s unusual to have contracts negotiate for a pay increase that is indexed to inflation, and that approach was dismissed.  But, we should keep in mind some points.  Between 2006 and 2020 the inflation over those years averaged about 2.24% each year.  When inflation is around 2%, contracts might have pay increases of about 2%.  That is what we would bargain for in normal times; something a little better than inflation. If inflation is going to average 2.24%, perhaps our annual pay increases could be about 2.5%.  But, just now, inflation is about 8%.  Therefore, we want pay increases that are higher than normal.  If we had some way to know for certain that inflation will drop to 1% or 2% in a couple years, we would be able to accept a lower annual pay increase, just trying to catch up to the over 13% we’ve fallen behind since the summer of 2020 (5.2% in 20-21 and 8% in 21-22 actually puts us 13.62% behind).  We accept that it will take years for our pay increase to get us back up to where we were, in inflation-adjusted dollars.  In our current proposal, if the administration accepted what we have on the table, our inflation-adjusted salaries for this year, next year, and following year would be below our 2020-2021 salaries, although a one-time hardship pay we’re seeking as a non-salary benefit would put us above that threshold either this year or next, if we received the full amount we’re asking for). 

The administration’s current offer would have us at about 97.46% of our 2020-21 salaries by the end of the contract using the optimistic inflation model, and  94.44% with the pessimistic scenario.  Our most likely counter-offer, which is hardly different from our last offer, would put our salaries in the fifth year of the contract at 103.8% of 20-21 in our pessimistic model and 107.2% in the optimistic inflation case model.  Because we have accepted that our pay will sink below its 2020-21 level in inflation-adjusted dollars for the first few years of this contract, in order to balance out our pay over the five years, we want to come out over 100% of 20-21 in the fifth year of the contract (ideally in both the fourth and fifth year of the contract).  We also think that if our argument that we are underpaid is correct, we should get over 100% of what we were earning in 2020-21. So, an inflation-adjusted salary target of 104% to 107% in the fifth year of the contract seems about right to us.  For faculty earning our median salary of $70,780 in 2020-2021, their salary in the fifth year would be $91,273 in 2025-2026, but adjusting for inflation and converting that $92,273 into 2020 dollars, the salary would be $72,653 (in the pessimistic inflation model, 2020 dollars) and $74,980 (in the optimistic inflation model, 2020 dollars).  As our average salary is about $4,000 less than the average faculty salary across peer institutions identified by the Board of Trustees and the Illinois Board of Higher Education, an inflation-adjusted salary that jumps from $70,780 in 2020 to $74,980 in 2025 is just about perfect, so if our optimistic inflation model turns out to accurately predict the future, our current proposal makes up the difference between our current salaries and the average salaries at peer institutions.

The faculty in our bargaining unit are not the only underpaid staff at UIS.  Strong enrollments and good retention of students requires our university to have well-staffed departments in marketing, admissions, and financial aid, as well as excellent tutors, advisors, and student support staff who help our online, commuter, and residential students succeed in their educations. Since we recognize the need for the university to increase the salaries of staff in these critical areas, and hire more persons with excellent skills in these areas, we of course don’t want all the plausible increases in revenue to only go to faculty.  But, we desire good stewardship of the public resources invested in our campus.  This means, largely, that we are upset when we see tens of thousands of dollars given to outside consultants and contractors who deliver to us products or services that are of dubious value. We are also irritated when resources are diverted into major efforts (in campus reorganization) that promise no improvement in educational value for students and no reduction in administrative overhead costs. 

Also, we are interested in the correct ratio of support staff and administration to persons who are involved in direct instruction.  We can examine the Gray Book for 2021-2022, a list of all University of Illinois employees and their salaries, to see the salaries of all the employees at UIS who have salaries (ignoring all those who earn hourly wages, and a few special cases, like the campus police, where their salaries are not reported), and see where the salary dollars go.  We’ve studied this, and find that the faculty in our bargaining unit get about $10.96 million, or 20.5% of all salaries.  Another group of faculty who aren’t in our bargaining unit (mostly department chairs and non-tenure-track faculty), plus online coordinators, tutors, and academic advisors, who we all consider front-line educators in the same category with us, are paid an additional $5.9 million, or 11% of all salaries.  So, putting those together, about 31.5% of the salaries at UIS are paid to people who directly help students learn and complete their degrees. There is another group of employees who provide college services and student services, including 16 administrators and 42 staff, counselors, coaches, trainers, etc.).  This group includes the deans for four colleges and their non-teaching salaried staff.  Many of these people are absolutely necessary, and probably deserve significant pay increases. Many of these people are critical to helping us recruit and retain students.  The cost for all these persons is $4.7 million, or 8.8% of all salaries and wages. Although we need many of these people, some of these positions might be cut as people retire, and perhaps we should not  replace them. We wonder if possibly the campus could function just as well with perhaps 53 rather than 58 of these college and student service persons, and perhaps $4.5 million rather than $4.7 million could go to the salaries in this group. 

 Then, we have 74 administrators and professionals who do not teach.  They pull in $6.4 million, or 11.9% of all salaries and wages.  This includes also many critical staff and administrative support.  The people in admissions, financial aid, and marketing are all in this group.  We actually want more of them, and want to pay them higher salaries.  Our Information Technology Department includes several of these persons, and we couldn’t get our work done without their help.  A campus needs lots of people who don’t teach, as these people keep the campus safe, prevent the buildings from falling apart, keep the grounds lovely so students like being on campus, and allow faculty to focus on their scholarship and teaching, so we don’t have to run everything ourselves.  But, we just think that our campus could probably do with fewer than 74 of these salaried supportive administrators and professionals, and the budget allocation ($6.4 million) to that group could be slightly decreased (maybe to $6 million for 65 of them instead of $6.4 million for 74 of them). 

The campus has many full-time employees who earn wages instead of salaries, or whose salaries are simply not included in the Gray Book.  According to the UIS report to IPEDS (the federal data-collection center for higher education), we have 724 full-time employees at UIS, and we know the salaries and names of 366 persons.  So, there are another 358 persons on campus who work full-time, and then also some part-time employees, including our adjunct instructors.  The salaries and wages for all these other full-time and part-time employees should take up about $14.6 million (that’s just taking the total amount reported as UIS expenses for salaries and wages in the budget and subtracting the salaries of everyone listed in the Gray Book or whose salaries we otherwise know about).  I don’t think we know enough about this group and their work to suggest there are cost savings to be had from them. Many are probably underpaid.  

Much of the IPEDS data are nearly (but not quite) useless to make comparisons among schools.  A couple variables that are more reliable and comparable are the counts of full-time faculty and all full-time employees.  These can be compared to create a ratio of faculty to all other full-time employees.  Looking at this ratio for the 20 schools in our peer group (as determined by the Board of Trustees and the Illinois Board of Higher Education), UIS comes in dead last, with faculty making up 27.9% of all employees. University of Southern Maine is pretty close to us with 28.4%, and Lake Superior State University (30.3%) and University of Baltimore ($30.6%) are not much better.   At most schools faculty make up 33% to 37% of all employees, and at the University of Nebraska at Kearney the faculty are 42.4% of all full-time faculty.  This statistic doesn’t just measure efficiency of campuses, however.  A school in financial distress may be cutting all non-faculty positions as its enrollments spiral down and state funding collapses, leaving a high proportion of faculty among the employees, since faculty are often among the last employees to be cut. Nevertheless, the fact that UIS comes in dead last among comparison groups fits with several other measures of efficiency we examined. In comparisons of various measures that should theoretically correlate somewhat with university efficiency (resources going directly to helping students learn) UIS falls in the bottom half or bottom third of almost all measures, just as it does with faculty salaries.  In Illinois, compared to the public universities, UIS has the lowest ratio of faculty to full-time employees among the teaching-oriented universities (UIC, UIUC, and SIU Carbondale are research universities, and have even lower ratios, as expected, and Illinois State, the other research university, is close to UIS with 28.7% of its employees among the faculty).  

Getting our campus from 27% to 29% (about where Northern and Northeastern are) if faculty counts remain at 202 would require a reduction of non-faculty employees of about 30, from 522 to 492, very approximately.  Among the comparison schools identified by IBHE and our Board of Trustees, a 29% faculty-to-all-staff ratio would move us from the lowest ratio to the second-lowest, just above the University of Southern Maine.  We believe the campus needs about 138 tenure-track faculty who don’t serve as department chairs or school heads; and about 64 faculty who are serving in department or school administration and non-tenure track faculty, which is close to the number we think we have now.  Our bargaining unit is down to 134 at the moment because of deaths and retirements so far this year, and more will retire in May, but we have assumed about 138 faculty will be the average number in our bargaining unit for the duration of the contract.

Trees on UIS campus near PAC

The administration has encouraged a reorganization of the university and proposes continuing with a four-college model, when it could have easily consolidated us into three colleges. A three-college model would surely have gained us some efficiency and reduced administrative cost, but that was not what the administration wanted to do. We were told that the reorganization was not about reducing administrative costs or increasing efficiency. 

So, if the Board of Trustees allocated 4.40% instead of 4.02% of the state’s allocation to the U of I System to UIS (bringing in about $1.6 million more than this year, given the 5% increase in funding to the University System for FY 2023), and the UIS campus had 14 fewer persons in administrative and support positions to save about $0.6 million, our administration would have $2.2 million to reallocate next year.  If we further suppose that undergraduate admissions can go up by 50 FTE and graduate headcount can hold steady, we would gave about $500,000 in additional tuition revenue.  That would give the administration $2.7 million more than they had this fiscal year, in total. Our current proposal asks for about $1.7 to $1.8 million more in salary or one-time bonuses in the next couple years, so that would be about 63% to 66% of next year’s increase.  Presumably state funding would continue to increase by about 2% to 3% the following year, and if inflation falls down to its normal 2.24% in subsequent years, state funding for the University of Illinois might come down to 1% per year. With those increases, the campus would have resources to meet our proposal. If we could increase student enrollment by 100 FTE instead of merely 50 FTE, and then hold that number of students without significant declines, that would increase tuition revenue by about $1 million in every subsequent year. The Board of Trustees could also increase tuition by a rate slightly lower than the previous year’s inflation rate, allowing tuition costs to hold steady or slightly fall relative to inflation. 

Tuition increases only apply to about 27% of our undergraduate students, because most of our students have guarantees for flat tuition rates for four years, but still, tuition could be increased to a level keeping pace with inflation, and that would build more revenue, which could further cover increased costs. When inflation is devaluing employee salaries by 13.6%, the salary increases of 2% keep all university employees in a state of declining living standards, and this stirs up anger in faculty who know they are already underpaid.  For the university to raise morale of staff and faculty, given that the state is increasing subsidies by 5%, raising tuition by 5% or 6% (well under the 8% inflation we have this year) would help all the workers employed by UIS.

All this is to say that when we look at reasonable forecasts for what UIS might have in increased revenue in the five years of our contract, we think that our current proposal is reasonable, and the campus and the University of Illinois System could afford it.