A subcommittee consisting of Assistant Vice President of Academic Affairs Margaret Doell, Human Resources Director Tracy Rogers, Associate Professor of Philosophy George Backen, and Assistant Professor of Theatre Jenna Neilsen, and I completed our work on creating the institutional peer group the compensation committee will use to benchmark compensation.
The first step in conducting our research entailed accessing two national databases to evaluate public 4year institutions for academic offerings, types and number of degrees awarded, enrollment size, and institutional operating budgets. Our primary source was the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA) database. CUPA members represent more than 18,000 HR professionals at over 1,900 member organizations and represent 91% of all U.S. doctoral institutions, 77% of all master’s institutions, and 57% of all bachelor’s institutions. Each year salary and compensation data is input into the system by member institutions in order to facilitate analysis of salary and compensation trends in higher education. To cross check the CUPA data against another source, we accessed the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is the core postsecondary education data collection program for the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the Institute for Education Sciences within the United States Department of Education.
The initial filtering of data resulted in a list of over 100 institutions. George, Jenna, and Margaret did more in-depth research by looking at institutional characteristics by researching institutions’ websites. Examples of outliers that were culled from the group in this step were institutions that offered strictly engineering degrees, an institution with only 500 students, and a school that delivered instruction primarily online.
In the end, we ended up with a group of 89 institutions (including Adams). An argument could be made to remove some and add others. For example, we discussed the merits of having a couple of institutions in Colorado as peers. While Fort Lewis is pretty close in size to Adams, their salaries across the board a much higher than those at Adams. This is largely driven by the cost of living in Durango. Try to buy a house in Durango for what you can in the Valley! Another one we debated was University of Northern Colorado. UNC’s has nearly 3 times the enrollment of Adams. We kept these two in, along with a few others, because they stretched the upper end of our criteria. In the case of the two Colorado schools, we decided to leave them in since they directly compete against us in job market. The others we left in because we felt we should strive to improve our quality education by stretching and competing at a higher level.
I want to thank Tracy, Margaret, Jenna, and George for their efforts. Everyone is going full tilt. Their willingness to find the additional time to assist in this project will benefit all of us!
To view ASU’s peer list click on this link: Adams State University Peer Institutions
