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Snow College can attract adjunct faculty from Juilliard, New York City's renowned performing arts school, to teach every summer at the two-year school in the heart of rural Utah.
But the Ephraim college cannot always pay enough to recruit teachers from Utah public schools.
In fact, nearly 40 percent of Snow's tenure-track faculty could earn more money teaching in nearby middle schools, Snow President Scott Wyatt says, citing one Salt Lake-area high school teacher who turned down an offer at Snow because the position would have meant an $8,000 pay cut.
"I'm thrilled the state has looked at public education as a priority, but you're leaving some of us out," Wyatt says, referring to the $1,700 raise the 2008 Legislature granted public educators. "The faculty of a college should be a step up in every respect, their competence, their degrees and their pay."
The college's plight is an extreme example of a nationwide trend toward weakening faculty pay, highlighted in a report to be released today by the American Association of University of Professors.
Nationally, faculty pay increased 3.8 percent this year, which represents a decline when measured against the 4.1 percent rise in the consumer price index, according to the report. This is the third time in four years that faculty pay increases have lagged behind inflation.
The report decries the growing disparity between faculty pay and what administrators and football coaches earn, as well as the pay disparity between public and better-endowed private institutions. Junior professors' pay at public institutions, for example, dropped from near parity with that of their counterparts at private schools in 1971 to just 83 percent now.
Among public universities offering doctoral degrees, the University of Utah's faculty pay matches national averages, although it still lags behind by about $10,000 when private schools are factored into the averages, according to the AAUP report. Full professors at the U. earn on average $109,500; assistant professors earn $68,700. Pay raises for U. professors outpaced the national average this year and tenure-track faculty saw their paychecks increase by 6 percent, according to U. administrators.
U. faculty pay is a few thousand dollars ahead of peer institutions in the Mountain West.
Still, administrators worry Utah pay is not competitive enough with private and more prestigious public institutions in California and other states that actively recruit mid-career professors from Utah's flagship school.
"Salaries for our faculty and staff are one of my biggest concerns," says David Pershing, the U.'s senior vice president for academic affairs. "They continue to be the administration's highest priority for legislative support."
Pershing said private school salaries now so far outpace those in the public sector that differences can exceed $100,000, "and that is unmanageable," he said. "A 3 percent annual increase does little to offset such differences."
The AAUP report points out that Division 1 football coaches generally earn 10 times what senior faculty make and the disparity grows every year.
"Only a few of the college athletes on the field, or of the students in the stands, will find their future success in life determined by what they learned on Saturday afternoons at the game," report author Saranna Thornton writes. "What will count most in the decades after graduation is what they learned from their professors in the classroom."
The U. pays six professors more than Ute football coach Kyle Whittingham, whose $704,000 salary is just less than seven times the average pay for a full professor. This coach-professor salary spread is typical of the Mountain West Conference, and far less severe than most power conferences. The ratio is 18.6 to 1 for schools in the Southeastern Conference.
Kathleen Mooney, chairwoman of the U. Academic Senate's faculty budget and planning committee, agrees with Pershing that pay remains a huge issue.
"If you choose an academic career, you have a reality focus on what your earning potential is. But when there are disparities in pay with my peers in other parts of the country earning $10,000 more, you have to question is it right to my family and my economic productivity for me to stay," says Mooney, who is frequently recruited. While Mooney has not seen many colleagues leave for more pay, the nursing school has suffered huge faculty losses to retirements, and the low pay scale makes it difficult to fill those jobs.
According to a 2007 study by the Utah System of Higher Education, the state has 862 faculty (about one in five of its professors) earning less than 90 percent of the market average. It would cost nearly $7 million a year to increase those professors' salaries to meet that 90 percent benchmark.
The state's lowest paid professors are at the College of Eastern University, where the starting pay is $34,000 and the institutional average is $44,800.
"We're counting on people who like living in a rural setting," says Kevin Walthers, a finance administrator at the community college in Price.