The Legislative Analyst’s Office released a report today “University of California Faculty Recruiting and Retention.”
This report challenges UCOP’s findings that faculty compensation is lagging, finding instead that UC’s average salary (apx. $120,000 — excludes health sciences and law) is ahead of the four public schools in the comparison eight (apx. $110,000), but lags the four private schools in the comparison eight (apx. $160,000).
The one paragraph synopsis of the report is:
In this report, we assess UC’s ability to recruit and retain tenured and tenure-track faculty. We find that (1) UC has been hiring candidates who have received their highest degree from some of the most selective universities in the nation, (2) UC has a long history of hiring its top choice faculty candidates, (3) most new entry-level faculty stay at UC long enough to earn tenure, (4) less than 2 percent of faculty resign from UC each year, and (5) UC’s faculty compensation is competitive with other top universities. These findings indicate that UC generally has been successful in its faculty recruitment and retention efforts. In light of these findings, coupled with the continuing need to prioritize limited state funding, the Legislature will need to assess the relative trade-offs between providing funding for faculty salary increases and other competing budget priorities involving faculty and higher education more generally.
The full report is available at:
http://lao.ca.gov/laoapp/PubDetails.aspx?id=2675