UNC looks to higher pay ranges for administrators
The UNC Board of Governors is expected to take action Friday to raise the pay ranges for many administrators on UNC campuses and the system office.
The broader pay ranges for vice presidents, vice chancellors, deans and other administrators would give the UNC president and chancellors latitude to pay their lieutenants more. The board’s personnel and tenure committee approved the new ranges at a meeting Thursday at the UNC School of the Arts.
In April, the board acted to ratchet up pay ranges for the president, chancellors and other top executives.
In the past year, a UNC board subcommittee studied executive pay with the help of a hired consultant who concluded that current salaries are based largely on pay across higher education and not reflective of the broader nonprofit and private sectors.
The old pay ranges for administrators used the midpoint as a guidepost. The new ranges will use the 75th percentile as a guide, with a larger spread on both ends of the spectrum.
For example, for a vice president for compliance and audit services, the new range would be $120,591 to $241,183. For a vice president for research and graduate education, the new range would be $242,829 to $388,526.
Ranges are parameters for setting salaries; the board is not handing out raises now.
But one new board member, former state lawmaker Thom Goolsby, voted against the ranges Thursday. He said national benchmark salaries were not adjusted to reflect a lower cost of living in North Carolina.
Goolsby said he was very concerned about the financial impact of the ranges. “We’re potentially spending money that we do not have,” he said.
G.A Sywassink, chairman of the personnel committee, said the ranges don’t mean that someone would be hired at the top end.
“We are not asking for a budget increase,” he said, “nor are we going to get a budget increase for this.”
This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 7:39 PM with the headline "UNC looks to higher pay ranges for administrators."