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Are low salaries causing a brain drain from UW-Madison?

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/28/2008 12:09 pm

When Alta Charo received a job offer in February from the University of California at Berkeley that included a raise of roughly $45,000, many assumed the high-profile law and bioethics professor would join the list of talented people leaving town for seemingly greener pastures.

Even Charo, a native of New York City, figured it might be a golden opportunity to ditch the small-town feel of Madison for something a little more fast-paced.

"There were a lot of reasons to take the job," said Charo, who spent 2006 as a visiting professor at Berkeley. "I have family now in the Bay Area. San Francisco and Berkeley are fantastic places to live -- San Francisco in particular is just the dream city in terms of urban excitement and the serendipity of what you see on the street. The law school there has an extraordinarily good reputation, one of the top 10 schools in the country by every measure."

And, she added, "No offense to my friends in Madison who love the winter sports, but the weather out there is better."

Of course, the salary was a good deal higher, too.

Charo eventually turned down UC Berkeley's offer for professional and personal reasons, but the close call once again brought to the fore the question of whether UW-Madison faculty members' relatively low pay makes the campus vulnerable to talent raids from schools with deeper pockets.

A front-page story this spring in the Chronicle of Higher Education -- a major national news source for the academic world -- on the number of key personnel losses the UW has suffered recently due to low pay also raised frustration levels on campus.

But is this brain drain -- a term abhorred by some on campus -- a phenomenon that is threatening UW-Madison's status as one of the elite public universities in America? Or is this turnover of faculty simply a fact of life for a large public institution of higher education?

The jury is still out, it appears. While losses of some faculty are worrisome, and the below-average pay is an issue many at UW-Madison would like to see addressed aggressively, professors and administrators on campus also stress that the university still is competitive, and able to attract and retain top-notch talent.

"It's not true that the apocalypse is coming to Wisconsin," said Michael Bernard-Donals, UW-Madison's Department of English chair, who last year alone saw eight professors from his department receive outside job offers. Five left town, although money was not a primary issue in three of these cases. This year, four people in Bernard-Donals' department have offers on the table or are expecting them soon.

"When we lose people, we may not be able to replace them as quickly as we like, but we are able to go out and hire other faculty, and some of the faculty that we're hiring are truly, truly exceptional," Bernard-Donals said. "So there is always going to be turnover, and departments will always change."

Still, Bernard-Donals believes UW-Madison must be more proactive in addressing the issue of low faculty pay so it doesn't snowball into a significant problem in the near future.

"The numbers are escalating, and I think this is the start of what might be a trend," he said. "I'd like to get ahead of this curve rather than feeling like we're constantly behind."

How far behind the pay scale curve is UW-Madison?

According to an annual survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors, the average salary of a full professor at UW-Madison for the 2007-08 school year was $106,981. In its peer group of 12 similar institutions -- which include UCLA, UC Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, Illinois, Ohio State, Minnesota, Washington, Michigan State, Indiana and Purdue -- the UW ranks last. Purdue is next to last at $111,300.

The rankings for associate professors and assistant professors are a bit better. Associate professors at UW-Madison make an average of $82,478, which ranks seventh among peers, while assistant professors make an average of $70,385, which ranks ninth.

"If others want to bring their own departments into the big time, they will go after quality faculty to help seed that effort," said Ronald Serlin, chair of the nation's top-ranked Educational Psychology Department. Serlin says his department at UW-Madison has lost six senior faculty members in the past five years.

"And those other schools are going to go where it's easiest to lure from, and that's where the lowest pay exists," he added.

According to data collected by the deans' offices at UW-Madison:

• In 2006-07, 90 faculty members (4.1 percent) received outside offers or pre-emptive salary adjustments. In each of the three previous years, 4.1 to 5.1 percent of faculty were recruited by other institutions or considered to be at high risk of leaving UW-Madison.

  Yet, in the four years before that (1999-00 to 2002-03), no more than 2.6 percent of faculty in a given year had been recruited or were considered at high risk of leaving.

• The average salary associated with outside offers was about 35 percent more than the UW-Madison salary. For those UW-Madison did not retain, the average salary increase was 50 percent.
• Outside offer packages also often included a reduced teaching load, added research support, a position for a spouse, domestic partner benefits or other key perks.

What frustrates some on the UW-Madison campus is this outside perception that when a professor is lost, a unit simply hires another person to come in and pick up the slack.

But it's not that simple.

"A big part of this is it's not just that we're losing individuals, but in many of the research-intensive programs, when people are hired away, they take with them their research productivity as well," said Julie Underwood, dean of the highly regarded School of Education. "They may be the principal investigator on a million-dollar grant. That grant money walks out the door as well."

According to UW officials, faculty turnover is indeed costly. The university figures it spends an average of $1.2 million in startup costs for each new professor -- and it generally takes eight years for that person to bring in enough research dollars to recoup that money.

Gary Sandefur, dean of UW-Madison's College of Letters and Science, is keenly aware of the perceived brain drain. According to data provided by the UW, in 2006-07, some 33 professors in his college -- the largest on campus -- received job offers from other universities, and the school retained only 19.

"One of the major disadvantages we have relative to our peer institutions is the low salaries that we pay," said Sandefur, who as of press time was one of four finalists for UW chancellor. "Our salaries have been lower than our peer institutions for much of the past 30 years, yet it hasn't kept us from being a great university."

True. But could it cause problems down the road?

"I don't want to minimize the problem," said UW-Madison Provost Pat Farrell. "No doubt we have limited resources, and that has been a problem. And, if over the next five years or so we are unable to find ways to address the overall faculty salary issue, this probably will get substantially worse.

"But the implication that this has gotten hugely worse over the past few years? No, not really."

Statistics seem to back him up. According to UW-Madison data from the last four years, the university has never lost more than 1.6 percent of its total faculty to outside offers. Data from the 1983-84 school year through 2003-04 shows the UW lost at least 1.6 percent of its total faculty four times -- with spikes of 2.1 percent in 1983-84 and 1985-86.

In other words, when one puts the current numbers in a historical perspective, there doesn't appear to be a major exodus of talent from UW-Madison.

John Coleman, chair of UW-Madison's Department of Political Science, agrees with that line of thinking even though his department lost nine people last year, four of whom officially retired.

While that one-year blow was tough, Coleman says if one compares his department's retention rate for those who receive outside offers to peer institutions over a three-year period, his department is doing just fine.

"I'm not trying to blow smoke," said Coleman. "Nine people leaving in a year doesn't feel good. But, looking at the bigger picture there are many more signs of optimism and this still is a fantastic, absolutely first-rate department that brings in great people year in and year out, and keeps great people year in and year out.

"No doubt, we have to address some resource and structural issues. But that does not mean the place is in a sort of a tailspin."

So, why did Charo -- a self-proclaimed "New York snob" who admits she used to complain about living in Washington, D.C., because it was too small -- stay at UW-Madison?

"There were a lot of reasons, but through this process for the first time I realized in my heart I had moved to Wisconsin," said Charo, who has lived here since 1989. "And I really did not want to leave the people here and this kind of state. I did not expect that. That degree of sentiment caught me by surprise."

Professionally, Charo said she did not see UC Berkeley's law school and public health school as a perfect fit. On the law side, Charo is most interested in law and public policy, and exploring how law is one of many factors driving human behavior.

On the science side of the equation, Charo has a great interest on life sciences, while Berkeley's specialty is geared more toward environmental sciences.

Charo also is extremely excited about the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the $150 million public-private research complex on the 1300 block of University Avenue that should be completed by the end of 2010.

"That is an incredibly exciting development and will be exactly the kind of place where somebody like me will want to play," she said of the project, which will have scientists working across interdisciplinary lines.

"Wisconsin invented the Wisconsin Idea," added Charo. "I think what they're trying to do at (UC Berkeley) is they're trying to create the California version of the Wisconsin Idea. But we had it here already."

But what about that roughly 30 percent raise Cal-Berkeley was dangling in front of Charo, who earns a base salary at UW-Madison of about $160,000?

"I will freely admit that it absolutely stopped me in my tracks," said Charo, who, nevertheless, believes she is well-paid here to do what she loves.

"On the other hand, basically, if I were to go there, I would sell my house in Madison, which I got almost 20 years ago and is completely paid off. And I would take every penny I got from selling my house and that would be -- I'm not exaggerating -- the down payment for a place out there.

"So I had to ask myself, 'If Berkeley is better at all, and it wasn't clear that it was, would it be so much better that it's worth basically mortgaging my life for?' That was insane."

Conversely, Charo understands the lure of big raises.

"I can tell you personally, both as a former associate dean of the Law School which oversaw faculty affairs and now more recently as chair of our Recruitment Committee, that we regularly were faced with the problem of our candidates being made offers at other schools with substantially higher salaries," she said. "And that definitely hurt us. They're not always being asked to move to a high-price place like San Francisco. You get a better offer to move to a place like Bloomington (Indiana) or Champaign (Illinois), and it really is worth all those extra dollars."

What, if anything, can UW-Madison do to keep a few more of its best and brightest?

First, the UW as a whole needs to be more proactive in dealing with salary increases, rather than having to react defensively to offers for valued faculty members, say several UW administrators.

But finding the funds for such actions isn't easy. After all, significantly raising tuition to reach that goal isn't a wildly popular proposal, and expecting the legislature to allocate substantially more money to the UW System simply isn't realistic at this time -- although last year the Legislature did approve $10 million to increase salaries of those in the UW System who are likely to leave.

"We really are going to have to find different ways to fund ourselves," said Bernard-Donals. "I think Wisconsin has been smart in that it really is looking to the private sector -- donors, federal grants and gifts to help fill some of the lag that we've seen in state funding.

As for private gifts, George and Pamela Hamel of San Francisco recently gave 10 fellowships worth $50,000 each to the College of Letters and Science that helped the UW target and retain some young star faculty. And the UW Foundation, the official fundraising and gift-receiving organization for UW-Madison and other donor-designated units of the UW System, is in the process of creating other fellows funds.

UW-Madison consistently ranks among the top 20 schools nationally in contributions. In 2007, the university was 13th in a survey by the Council for Aid to Education, bringing in $325.3 million in contributions.

But private gifts are not going to keep the university competitive on salary, and the Legislature needs to do its share, said Bernard-Donals.

"The fact is, we are a state university, we are a benefit to the state, and we'd like the state to recognize that."

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/28/2008 12:09 pm