Tuesday, November 12, 2013
The Daily Illini | www.DailyIllini.com
2
How has salary guide changed?
E
mployees’ salaries are one of the main components of the University’s budget. The salaries we requested this year add up to nearly $1.8 billion. With the University’s ongoing process of reviewing its spending and making decisions in this budget crisis, there has never been such an important time for transparency. In publishing this guide, The Daily Illini aims to continue the transparency the administration has begun. We feel it is the right of Illinois taxpayers and the University’s tuition-paying students to see how their money is being spent at the on University, including on salaries. The figures listed in this guide and in our database do not include all compensation, such as overtime, benefits and other pay means. The database does, however, list part-time and full-time employees. It goes without saying that many factors affect how much each employee is paid, including experience, education, specialized training and skill level. Regardless, our philosophy is that more information is better than less information, and that the more access readers have to this information, the better job the University will do in using that money wisely. To provide readers with the most up-to-date information, we’re presenting “Grey Book” data, which is provided by the University with information on academic, salaried appointments. This means the data for University of Illinois employees is current as of September 2013, when the Board of Trustees approved the salaries for all University employees. The salaries that we’re publishing are based on the annual appointments that will carry through the forthcoming year, which ensures that our database includes the administrative appointments that didn’t take effect until the beginning of this year. For nonacademic, civil service wages, the University provided us with their average salaries based on hourly wages for 52 40-hour weeks a year. We occasionally get this question: “My salary is personal. Why is it being published?” Like many other things published by The Daily Illini, state employees’ salaries are public record. Salary Guide does not include personal information such as addresses, phone numbers or social security numbers. Anyone can file an Illinois Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the information we’ve printed here. And for all academic positions, anyone can download the University’s Grey Book as a PDF or view it online at uillinois.edu, but we don’t expect that to be nearly as accessible as the information we’re presenting. This year, the print edition focuses on the context of top administrator’s pay compared with their peers and provides an indepth look at the budget for the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics. In addition, it examines how much the University is spending on emeriti professors. Online, in our full database of employees’ pay from all three campuses, you can see how much more an employee is making than the rest of his or her campus, or how his or her salary compares with the department’s median pay. To access the full list, visit SalaryGuide.DailyIllini.com.
A note from the editor
a note from the developer
Maggie huynh
nathaniel lash
Managing editor
News apps developer
T
We
here’s no doubt college is becoming less affordable each year. Still, this University sees many students and families who are willing to take out loans, pay out of pocket and work extra jobs to pay for an Illinois education. So where does Salary Guide fit in? The Daily Illini publishes its annual Salary Guide to allow students, parents and even state taxpayers to see where their money goes. Are those lackluster professors who receive hefty paychecks truly deserving of their high salaries? What about those loved professors who don’t make half of what the University’s top earners make? By publishing these salaries, we are holding the University and its employees accountable for the education of more than 40,000 students. Those who are paying to attend this school will be able to see if money is being fairly distributed based on performance. This year, our print publication is less about listing the salaries of the highest paid employees. Student tuition and Illinois taxpayer money is being allocated toward areas you might not have thought about. This includes retired professors who come back because they love teaching, but it’s also paying the salaries of former University presidents who resigned amid scandals. We hope that through Salary Guide, you’ll be able to better understand how your money is being used.
started publishing Salary Guide in Spring 2010, a time when data journalism began moving into its “hyperactive toddlerhood.” At that time, Salary Guide was about providing readers with a single number: a certain person’s salary. But The Daily Illini billed itself as a guide to people’s salaries, not a dictionary. As data journalism matures, we owe it to our entire audience to provide you with visualized, contextualized information that will help you actually understand what each salary means. We built this year’s Salary Guide with the goal of making it easy for our readers to arm themselves with this information. The question “who earns the most?” is unambiguously answered within the pages of this edition. But the question “is this fair?” is more complicated. We hope that our work makes answering that question much easier for you, whether you’re a University employee, tuition-paying student or parent, or just someone interested in the University of Illinois. This is the first of what we hope will be many applications that will help students, faculty, staff and anyone with an interest in how the University of Illinois and the Champaign-Urbana region operates. So visit SalaryGuide.DailyIllini.com on your mobile phone or your desktop computer. We hope you find the experience thoroughly informative. Happy searching!
Maggie can be reached at huynh11@ dailyillini.com and @maggiehuynh.
Nathaniel can be reached at lash2@ dailyillini.com and @nat_lash.
Staff list Editor-in-chief Darshan Patel Managing editor Maggie Huynh Creative director Eunie Kim news apps developer Nathaniel Lash News editor Lauren Rohr Sports editor Eliot Sill Photo editor Brenton Tse
Design editor Scott Durand Designers Bryan Lorenz, Sadie Teper copy chief Lindsey Rolf, Audrey Majors Copy editors Alyssa Voltolina, Sari Lesk Web editor Folake Osibodu Publisher Lil Levant Much of the text on this supplement’s cover comes from an unused collective bargaining contract between teachers and the School District of Philadelphia. The contract was published by the independent, nonprofit Philadelphia Public School Notebook quarterly newspaper.