This research brief explores why "projection estimates" are not an effective approach to budget planning by comparing past projections to CUPA-HR's database of real-world salaries. The results shed light on why data-informed and data-driven decisions are a more effective way to think about budget planning. In this brief you'll learn…

California had a long tradition of very low tuition for students enrolled in public higher education. The state broke with that policy in the 2000s, when recessions resulted in significant cuts to state funding for public colleges and universities--the University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and California's community…

If cash-strapped universities want an easy way to save money, Lawrence B. Martin, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has an idea. By tallying faculty output in areas such as publication rates in scientific journals, Mr. Martin has concluded that there could be as much as $1-billion to $2-billion in…

In this paper the author explores how colleges whose primary mission is undergraduate education can strategically allocate resources in a way that reduces costs and prioritizes teaching and learning. He starts from a provocative thought-experiment--what would it cost to educate undergraduates at a hypothetical college built from scratch?--and uses…

Even though the author and his colleagues are part of a major research university, they agonize, in meeting after meeting, over the 5 to 10-percent yearly cuts they need to make in their chemistry department's budget. By and large, those end up coming from education, not research, especially in faculty replacements and teaching assistants. The…

One of the primary objectives of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) is to develop methods and techniques to assist institutional decision makers in allocating and utilizing available resources. Besides being key institutional resources, faculties are primary users of financial resources. Their salaries often…

This article discusses how one small liberal arts school, Wheaton College in Massachusetts, devised a strategic plan to improve faculty salaries by linking improvements in salaries to improvements in college resources. The benefits of the salary plan went beyond improving salaries. First, the plan dictated that faculty salaries be determined at…

The approach taken by Virginia to analyze and establish policy for college and university administrator salaries, as they relate to other institutions and to the salaries of instructional faculty, is outlined. A methodology felt to be appropriate for this analysis, tested on eight institutions, is described and illustrated. (MSE)

The evolution of California's attempts to determine college faculty salary comparability within and outside the state are chronicled and discussed, focusing on the difficulties inherent in the comparison. (MSE)

Identifying higher education cost drivers and working to limit their effects appears to be a necessity if higher education is to retain the support historically allocated by society. Costs occur for three groups: students, institutions, and society. This paper summarizes information about cost drivers in higher education and identifies two that…

The balancing of salary needs for financial resources requires that university administrators take a careful look at supply and demand factors in the academic marketplace when allocating salary funds to colleges and departments within a university. Quality academic programs can be maintained only if quality faculty members are attracted and…

The University of North Dakota conducted a feasibility study to develop a faculty funding formula that would serve as an internally acceptable guideline and an externally justifiable procedure for allocating faculty in the budgeting process. The current formula is reviewed, and appropriate formula revisions are suggested. (MLW)

In 1978 when Ross Pritchard became president of the University of Denver, he halted the budgeting process and turned a deficit into a surplus. Now that the "crisis management" phase of the school turnaround is over, future plans for the university call for improving academic quality, finances, and national stature. (MLW)

This statement by the AAUP Committee T on College and University Government defines the role of the faculty in decisions as the allocation of financial resources according to the principle of shared authority and offers some principles and derivative guidelines for faculty participation in this area. (LBH)

An approach to obtain disciplinary specific salary information for the institution of higher education budget process by mid-winter is considered. The approach involves using current year institutional mean salaries and prior year relative average salaries by academic discipline to provide "current" salary comparisons by academic…