Faculty Salaries at Memorial

Context

Administration and the Faculty Association at Memorial University have reached an impasse in their negotiations for a new collective agreement, and it is expected that faculty members will soon vote on a strike mandate.

In anticipation of making this important decision, I wanted to better understand how Memorial's faculty compensation stacks up against other similar institutions across Canada. Fortunately, as a labour market economist, I have experience working with publicly-available faculty salary data from provincial salary disclosure websites and Statistics Canada tables.

So I took a few minutes to look into this issue for myself. Here is what I found. (Click the images to enlarge.)

Top Earners are Paid Competitively

While the aggregate data from Statistics Canada shed some light on pay disparities across institutions, more granularity is needed to take a closer look at the top of the income distribution.

This lead me to compile a micro-level payroll dataset from provinces with compensation disclosure laws ("Sunshine List"). A limitation of using Sunshine List data is that employees need to earn above a specific threshold to be included, which leads to a sample selection problem. But since my focus here is on high incomes and this is all the data we have available, I decided to take a look anyway.

In what follows, I restrict my attention to comprehensive universities in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and British Columbia. I exclude Alberta because its disclosure threshold is too high to draw meaningful comparisons, as well as Manitoba and Nova Scotia because all the institutions fall into other categories. The remaining provinces do not have disclosure laws and must be left out.

The next three figures 99th Percentile of Salary for All Faculty, 99.5th Percentile of Salary for All Faculty and Average Salary among Top-10 Highest Paid report different metrics of salaries for the highest earners. The last figure means I restrict the sample to the 10 highest-paid employees at each institution and then calculate the average salary among them. Ultimately, these figures show that Memorial offers competitive salaries at the very top - even compared to other institutions in cities where the cost of living is higher.

Extra Work & Pay Needed to Hit the Salary Floor

An interesting feature of the Sunshine List data for Memorial is that base pay and total compensation are both reported, along with job title and responsibilities. Most institutions do not report both types of compensation.

Total pay is typically higher than base pay due to overtime, bonuses, and other compensation such as extra teaching. Non-wage benefits such as pension contributions are not included. As an indicator of how much extra work is needed for Memorial faculty to earn their current salaries, I am interested in knowing how these two salary measures compare. I focus on Assistant, Associate and Full Professors who do not have any administrative responsibilities.

Comparing the two salary figures, we see in the figure Base Versus Total Compensation that total compensation is about $2k higher than base. This means in order to be competitive on pay (at least with UQAM), Memorial's faculty members with no administrative responsibilities are taking on extra work of nearly half a course, on average.

In addition, the data permit me to see that approximately 25% of faculty take on some extra work. In the figure Base Versus Total Compensation if Extra Pay Received, we see that these faculty members have total compensation that is about $7k higher, or 1.4 extra courses, on average.

Summary

This blog post is not meant to convey a strong opinion for or against a strike mandate in the anticipated vote. There are serious concerns with either decision.

While faculty salaries at Memorial are quite low compared to other universities, this is still a high-paying profession. We have been very fortunate as faculty members to have excellent job security over the past few years during a time when so many families in the province and country have struggled. Students have also struggled a lot through the pandemic with so much classroom disruption and transition to online learning, and nobody wants to see yet another interruption.

However, Memorial is the province's only university and it plays a critical role in training future generations. Its reputation and competitiveness on national and international stages are paramount to retain existing talent and attract new talent. It is hard to see how Memorial's current trajectory will be able to achieve this long-term goal. 

Note on Methodology

All the analysis in this blog post derives from publicly-available data. The links to these datasets are provided throughout.

Results from Statistics Canada Table 37-10-0108-01 are based on all faculty members (Assistant, Associate and Full) at the institution, both with and without senior administrative responsibilities, excluding employees who hold a rank or appointment below Assistant Professor. Medical faculty are excluded since pay determination is less clear in this case.

Results from the Sunshine List data for Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and British Columbia restrict to observations with salaries of $100,000 or more. In some provinces, the threshold for disclosure is lower. The $100k threshold is used everywhere to be consistent with the policy implementation of Newfoundland and Labrador. I also exclude Memorial University employees whose campus is labelled as "Medicine" since clinical pay is included in total compensation. To my knowledge, no other comprehensive university has a medical program so no equivalent adjustment is needed to the disclosure data from other provinces.

Data and Code Replication Package

Replicability is an important part of economic science. Click here to download my data and code. Comments welcome!

Updates

• (Jan. 8th) The "Top Earners" analysis initially included medical faculty. Since clinical pay was included, I dropped all medical faculty from the analysis. The results have been updated accordingly. I thank Raymond Gosine and Noel Roy for bringing this to my attention.

• (Jan. 9th) Related to the previous update, I revised the "Extra Work & Pay Needed" section to exclude medical faculty.

• (Jan. 10th) I slightly revised the statement "While there are lower-paying institutions out there, none except for UQAM... pay less" to say "no other comprehensive university... pays less." I also changed '%' to 'k' in the "Lowest Pay Growth" section.