Compensation issues at UNCA

Past and present explorations of compensation for faculty and staff at UNCA

import {summarize_data, make_salary_viz} from './components/system_salary_viz.js';
small_summary_salaries = await (await FileAttachment("./data/small_summary_data.csv")
    .csv({typed: true}));
make_salary_viz(small_summary_salaries, {animate: true, tooltips: false})

Figure 1: Average faculty salaries across the UNC System adjusted by CoL; more detail below.

UNCA has long been underfunded but things seem to have taken a turn for the worse around 2013. Since 2015, several committees, task forces, and other groups have studied the issue and produced reports, with a particular interest on how it relates to faculty and staff compensation. As a member of Faculty Senate during part of that time who also works with data, I became involved with some of those groups. Since I was recently reappointed to the standing committee on compensation, I thought it might be a good time to gather some of that old material in one place and to start to put some new material together.

Past reports

Here are all the written reports on compensation at UNCA that I’m aware of ordered chronologically by release date. There’s also a little of my own commentary.

0. Task Force on Faculty Salary and Equity - Jan 2018
   

   This \(\text{zero}^{\text{th}}\) report predates my participation and is a bit different from the remaining documents in that it is not primarily motivated by concern with the level of compensation at UNCA. It focuses more on equity between and within departments and with procedures for maintaining fairness moving forward. The report does note, however, that “substantive salary increases had not been available for several years”.

1. Task Force on Total Compensation - May 2019
   

   By Fall of 2018, concern over the level of compensation at UNCA had grown and a new task force to study that specific issue was formed. I was appointed to that task force as a member of the Institutional Development Committee of Faculty Senate.

   This report focused on salary and benefits for both faculty and staff at UNCA. It compared that compensation to cost of living as measured by consumer price index for Southeast urban areas. We had good data on both of those going back a couple of decades so we were able to illustrate how our effective compensation has decreased over time.

   There were several issues with this study, such as

   • We did not study compensation with our peers in either the system or with similar institutions, simply because that was not part of our charge.
   • We did not study the relationship between compensation and housing costs in Asheville. We would’ve liked to study this but the data is simply hard to come by.
2. UNCA Salaries and Housing in Asheville - June 2019
   

   When the work of the prior Task Force on Total Compensation was nearing completion, I happened to stumble upon some outstanding data on housing costs in Asheville via personal relationship with people at Mosaic Realty. I used that data to compare the rate of growth of compensation at UNCA with the cost of home ownership going back a decade and a half. This document is the result of that work.

   While this work was too late to appear in the immediately preceding task force report, it does appear as an addendum.

3. Informal report on Faculty Compensation - Feb 2022
   

   In November of 2021, Chancellor Cable announced the “historic” news that the newly passed state budget included a 7% raise to be split over the next two years. Unfortunately, the truly “historic” part was that a budget had finally been passed, we had not received raises for some time, and that 7% over two years did not even keep up with inflation. After email discussions over these issues, as was common on faculty_official@unca.edu at that time, a group of faculty formed an independent working group to study and make a stronger statement on these issues.

   This report was presented to to FWDC in Feb 2022 and

   • Focuses on faculty, while acknowledging the situation is dire for staff as well,
   • Is a stronger statement, describing the situation as a “crisis”,
   • Refers to the prior task force data on salaries and provides new assessments using BLS data,
   • Addresses morale via surveys like Harvard’s COACHE and the UNC System Employee Engagement Survey,
   • Contains a lists of asks of the administration including
     • the commitment to secure cost-of-living adjustments and
     • to develop the means to improve salaries at UNC Asheville

   The authors of this report are not identified, though it’s signed by 58 faculty members.

4. UNCA Faculty Salaries - Apr 2022
   
   I was a member of the informal working group and contributed a fair amount of data and analysis. This webpage represents my own analysis of the issues with a focus on

   • comparisons with multiple cohorts and evolution over time,
   • effect on faculty retention, and
   • salary compression (it sucks being old, you know).
5. Revitalization Plan - Sep 2022
   

   The compensation issues at UNCA are part of broader financial issues involving enrollment, tuition, state appropriations and other issues generally at the state level. Spearheaded by former Chancellor Nancy Cable, former Provost Kai Campbell, and former VC for Financial Affairs John Pierce, the “Revitalization Plan” was an attempt to address all these. This is their presentation document as of Sep 2022.

   This document states several challenges that UNCA has faced historically including

   • turnover in leadership,
   • biases in the funding model, and
   • cost of living in Asheville.

   The document also proposes a comprehensive plan involving

   • increased enrollment,
   • replacement of key staff members,
   • budget discipline,
   • a fundraising campaign, and
   • investment from the state.

   Two years of significant state funding were obtained and towards something, I guess. The Asheville Ideas Fest arose from philanthropic donations.

   Note: While enrollment is part of this strategy, it’s important to note that the plan states quite clearly that “enrollment alone won’t provide the net revenue to close the shortfall”. It goes further to say “Enrollment up to 4,000 students will yield roughly $5M towards a $24M shortfall.” This statement is based on a detailed study by John Pierce and does not appear to be accounted for in current strategies. According to a recent conversation I had with John, enrollment up to 5000 still comes nowhere close to closing the shortfall.
6. First Compensation Committee report - Feb 2023
   

   In response to the informal working group, a standing committee was formed to continue to monitor salaries and compensation at UNCA. I was the first chair of that committee and this is our first report.

   We generally approved of the Revitalization Plan and endorsed it. We particularly liked the fact that the plan makes a strong case that UNCA is simply underfunded by the state. We were also happy to see two years of investment coming to UNCA but were deeply disappointed to see absolutely no investment in current faculty and staff.

7. Slides for committee presentation to Staff Council - Mar 2023
   

   As chair of the Compensation Committee, I presented our findings to both Faculty Senate and Staff Council. These are the slides I used for those presentations.

As far as I know, the Compensation Committee has not met since Spring of 2023. I vaguely recall being told that I was on that committee the following year. I think my response was something along the lines of “The hell I am”.

Current situation

Since I was reappointed to the damn committee again this year, I thought I’d gather the most recent data and take a quick look at compensation across the UNC System. The visualization below is the result. It shows average salaries for various groups of non-medical faculty across the UNC System.

viewof group = Inputs.radio(
  ["All", "Professor", "Associate", "Assistant", "Lecturer"],
  {label: "Group:", value: "All"}
)
viewof sort_by = Inputs.radio(["Avg Salary", "Name"], {label: "Sort by:", value: "Avg Salary"})
viewof col_adjust = Inputs.toggle({label: "CoL Adjust:", value: true})

summary_data = summarize_data(data, group, sort_by, col_adjust)
make_salary_viz(summary_data);

You can explore the different faculty groups and adjust for cost of living (CoL) or not. When adjusted for CoL, UNCA ranks dead last by pay for every group. Even when not cost adjusted, UNCA ranks in the bottom third for all groups but lecturers.

Further comments

Data sources

The salary data here comes from the UNC Salary Information Database. The UNC Database provides microdata on salaries for all employees of the UNC System. It’s updated quarterly so it makes for an excellent resource that’s detailed and current.

The Cost of Living (CoL) data comes from Best Places used here was recorded in October of 2025. Here, for example, is Best Places CoL page on Asheville, which indicates that Asheville has a CoL of 105.8.

At any point in time, the overall CoL for the US is set to 100. Thus, Asheville’s CoL of 105.8 indicates that the general cost of living in Asheville is about 5.8% higher than the national average. The adjusted salaries are computed by \[ \text{adjusted salary} = \text{raw salary}\times\frac{100}{\text{CoL}}. \]

Potential further work

• The interactive tool above suggests that relative salary situation at UNCA is worst for Full Professors with a CoL adjusted salary over $18,000 lower than the next lowest school. No other faculty group is nearly so low, suggesting that salary compression may be a serious issue. That could easily be studied directly.

• It would also be nice to include staff in this study. The data is not particularly clean, though, and employee positions aren’t described in as much detail as I’d like. It was reasonably easy to separate out the non-medical faculty and classify them as I’ve done here. There are many, many more staff members, though. Perhaps, I’ll look at all staff at some point, but I don’t know of a reasonable way to separate natural subgroups of staff at the moment.

• Finally, I might incorporate IPEDS data - a nationwide data source for all schools in higher education going back to 1980. IPEDS provides very clean and fairly reliable summary data on a huge range of issues, including faculty and staff salary information. It’s provided by the federal government via the Department of Education and is still available, though data collection has recently stopped. Data dissemination has always lagged a bit so it’s not always the best source for the most current information. Nonetheless, it’s the only source that provides longitudinal data for virtually all schools in the US.

data = {
  const salaries = await (await FileAttachment("./data/unc_system_condensed_salaries.csv")
    .csv({typed: true}))
    .filter(o => o.job_category != "administrator")
  const CoL = await FileAttachment("./data/UNC_System_CoL.csv").csv({typed: true});
  const groupedCoL = d3.group(CoL, o => o.Abbreviation);
  salaries.forEach(function(o) {
    const d = groupedCoL.get(o.school_abbr)[0];
    o.school_name = d.School;
    o.CoL = d.CoL;
    o.group = o.job_category == "professor" ? "Professor" :
      o.job_category == "associate_professor" ? "Associate" :
      o.job_category == "assistant_professor" ? "Assistant" :
      "Lecturer"
  });
  return salaries
}