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Part I: Faculty compensation in the context of an AAU research university

���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ approach to faculty compensation must be grounded in our position as a leading comprehensive research university with a strong national and international reputation. This standing is reflected in our membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization whose members are recognized for excellence in research and scholarship, including research activity and expenditures, faculty achievement and awards, National Academies membership, and scholarly impact It also places us among institutions classified as “Highest Research Activity” or “R1” by the Carnegie Classification.��

This context is critical when evaluating the compensation of our tenured and tenure-track faculty and developing a philosophy and strategy to strengthen our competitive position. Most importantly, we must recognize that hiring, supporting, and retaining faculty require compensation that is comparable to and competitive with that of our AAU peers, particularly public AAU institutions. The AAU currently includes 38 U.S. public universities, two Canadian public universities, and 31 private universities, all of which compete in a national and international market for tenured and tenure-track faculty.��

Our status as a comprehensive R1 university also has direct implications for the compensation of teaching and research faculty. While the task force report finds that the current salaries of our teaching professors are comparable to peer institutions, it is important to recognize that these colleagues play a vital role in our academic mission and student success. As such, they must be included in any comprehensive compensation philosophy and long-term strategy designed to secure ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ academic and financial future.��

Similarly, research faculty, whose positions are often supported through external grants and contracts, contribute significantly to the university’s research mission and reputation. Although their role within the university differs from that of other faculty groups, their compensation should also be regularly assessed and monitored as part of a long-term strategy to support research excellence and maintain institutional competitiveness.��

Recognition of AAU member public universities as our peer group is the starting point of our faculty compensation philosophy. Several other factors are also essential elements of this philosophy.��

First, alongside the need to have salaries on par with our peers, we must pay attention to equity issues, including compression within departments and faculty ranks.��Compression—in which newly hired faculty or more junior ranks, earn as much or more than more senior colleagues or higher ranks is common in higher education, but can threaten faculty morale and our ability to retain faculty.��

Second, we should pay particular attention to our market peers at the entry point for assistant professors into ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������. As the report indicates, salary gaps with our peers are smaller at the entry level, suggesting that we are doing a somewhat better job at paying attention to peer salaries at initial hire, but even for those faculty there remains a gap. Here, our strategy must include systematic attention to our outside market of peers at the time of hire.��

Third, the need to retain our faculty against outside offers from peer and aspirational peer institutions means that we must also consider appropriate variation in compensation that recognizes and rewards excellence across and within departments and to individuals at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������. This approach is reflected in our salary policies through career merit, while also accounting for market variation across disciplines and sub-disciplines. Within any department, there will be individuals whose research and creative work impact is particularly high, either over their careers or at a particular point in time. Moments in faculty careers when research breakthroughs occur or are broadly recognized often coincide with the appearance of outside offers.��

Our approach must recognize that higher compensation for those with outsized impact in research and creative work is essential to retain our best faculty, and should not mistakenly be considered at odds with equity considerations. There will also be contributors who have particularly notable contributions to teaching or service, and those should also be recognized with appropriate compensation differences.��

Fourth, our strategy must recognize that we live, learn, and study in one of the most expensive, yet highly desirable regions of the state and the nation. Our approach must account for the high cost of living in or near Boulder, while also reflecting the choices available to faculty and the reality that some of these higher costs are associated with the quality of life and amenities that make this area an attractive place to live and work. It can be extremely difficult to agree upon detailed cost-of-living figures for local geographic areas in a particular year. Many cost-of-living calculators exist that provide estimates of differences across local areas; these should be used cautiously as they can be highly variable, and depend on assumptions about housing stock quality, treatment of taxes, commuting costs, and many other factors. What is clear, however, is that Boulder is a high-cost metropolitan area and our salary standards should reflect, even if imperfectly, those higher costs.��

Part II: Specific actions and investments in response to the task force recommendations 

1. Invest in faculty salary competitiveness and equity 

This recommendation is central to acting on the compensation strategy above. Initial steps are focused around three concepts: Bring additional resources for structural adjustments of faculty salaries to advance competitiveness with peers; use existing and new resources to address equity concerns; and acknowledge that these two processes must be undertaken together with care that short-term equity concerns not block progress toward more competitive salaries in the medium- and long-term.��

I have worked with Senior Vice Chancellor Todd Haggerty and Chancellor Justin Schwartz to identify a pool of $6 million in additional central campus funding over the next three years to improve competitiveness of ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ tenured and tenure-track faculty compensation. This is outside and beyond the normal annual merit pools and comes from a combination of the supplemental funding within the budget model, the chancellor’s strategic funds, and other resources identified by SVC Haggerty. To this $6 million, individual school and college deans have agreed to contribute additional funding to raise salaries within their units, with the centralized funds serving as a match, up to 1:1, for a total of up to $12 million over the next three years.��

For some schools and colleges with less room in their individual recurring budgets, my office will work to find ways to progress if they lack sufficient funds to match the available central contribution. In most cases, this amounts to roughly 3% of their budgets spread over 3 years, and so should be feasible. Finally, this may require some careful thought and tradeoffs between the rate and level of hiring. Our philosophy suggests that it is important, as long as our research and teaching missions are being served, to favor raising salary levels over expanding the number of faculty until we make progress on this critical issue.��

In implementing this structural adjustment, deans will be asked to prioritize efforts on departments and ranks that are most behind our peers, and with the strongest research and creative work profiles relative to those peers, recognizing and preserving appropriate variability across and within units. This pool should be applied with the goals of raising the overall levels, but also providing an opportunity to address equity issues that have emerged.��

In addition, my recommendation is that we continue to encourage parts of the annual merit pool to address equity issues when they are present. With new funds being invested in faculty compensation, and other parts of our planned strategy active, it is almost inevitable that new equity issues may arise, and we need to continue to have annual processes and funding dedicated to equity.��

2. Formalize compensation expertise, training, and support 

While new resources devoted directly to faculty salaries are critical, these resources cannot be well-deployed without adding some HR expertise focused on faculty compensation. Efforts to address this issue are under way. First, in March, the provost’s office developed (in collaboration with campus Human Resources) and posted a position for a new director of faculty compensation that will soon be hired. As we begin to implement this plan, the short-term needs may be more intense than the long-term needs, so we would be well served to engage short-term consulting support for the initial phase. Eventually this position (or positions) will help advise deans, associate deans and chairs on how to structure and adjust compensation, keeping in mind our competitive position and equity and compression concerns. This will include both consultation and training so that our annual processes can be more systematically informed on market and other pressures.��

In addition, the vice provost for academic resource management has developed new draft policies (currently under review with BFA) and new procedures for implementing more systematic salary reviews to inform our processes. Finally, two types of investments to improve faculty support more generally are included as part of the long-term HR Blueprint planning on campus. First, ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ HR will add expertise in faculty compensation to their larger compensation group. Second, the Office of Faculty Affairs within the Office of the Provost has plans to invest in several positions to improve professional development and support of tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, and lecturers. While these new staff members will not be specifically dedicated to compensation matters, it will grow our footprint of HR expertise dedicated to the faculty space, and will support ongoing efforts to provide a strong faculty employee experience.

3. Standardize access to and use of ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ data and external benchmarks 

Tenured and tenure-track faculty compensation strategies benefit from the availability of significant compensation data resources gathered by our AAU peers. CU system has recently made available a faculty salary tile, so that all faculty salaries are available to view. We have also requested some refinements to that tile that will make it easier to use by allowing sorting by department and rank. In addition, I recently confirmed with Data and Analytics that all schools and college leaders, including deans, associate deans and chairs, should have access to the AAU faculty salary comparison dashboard. This will allow for offers and retentions to be made with a clear understanding of what our peers are offering.

4. Maintain competitive tenure and promotion increases 

The approach articulated above references both the need to be more competitive, and the need to recognize outstanding faculty performance. In addition, the taskforce report makes clear that our biggest salary gaps are among faculty who have gone through our two milestone promotions (to associate professor and professor). With this in mind, I have proposed, and secured additional funding in the Faculty Actions Pool, beginning in FY 2027, for larger increases at promotion steps to associate professor, professor, associate teaching professor, and teaching professor.��

The report expresses pros and cons of setting promotion increases in dollar versus percentage terms, and so we will move to a hybrid approach. Specifically, we will move to an increase of $8500 or 8.5% for promotion to associate professor, whichever is greater. Comparable amounts for other promotion steps are shared in the chart below. The flat amount should be increased by 3% per year, and should be reviewed every three years. This moves away from an annual growth in the dollar amount tied to our merit pool because that could put the promotion increase at risk during financial downturns, and we should make every effort to keep the promotion increases aligned with peers and national trends.��

Finally, a cap of $20,000 will be applied to any percentage increase. While there are equity-related reasons to prefer a flat dollar amount, some disciplines demand a higher salary scale, often driven by outside market forces for the related skills. Without the flexibility of a percentage- based promotion step amount, we are likely to continue to lose ground in keeping our senior faculty salaries competitive in our higher compensation disciplines. This will involve raising the faculty actions pool budget by approximately $525,000 per year.

5. Develop a more rigorous and standardized approach to faculty retention increases 

I have begun working with the vice provost for academic resource management to standardize and improve both our efforts toward, and data collection around, retention actions for faculty. Some preliminary analysis of retention data over the past several years suggests this is necessary. For example, in the last two years, our average retention offer (both accepted and not) has amounted to approximately 75% of the increase offered by an outside institution. This does not include retention requests for which no counter offer was made. While every outside offer does not justify a 100% match, it is essential that–– if our goal is to be on par with our peers in salaries––we be more aggressive in matching outside offers made by our peers to top faculty. In particular, when those outside offers are in line with broader patterns shown in AAU peer salary data, and the faculty involved are strong contributors, we should be able to match. The challenge here is often that matching an outside offer may produce additional equity issues within the unit. I have been encouraging deans to work with my office to develop plans, and sometimes request funds from my office to address the equity issues created when warranted. Over time, as we proceed with all steps of this plan, particularly implementing our response to recommendation 1, this issue should diminish.��

A second data pattern that arose from our initial retention investigation addresses an often heard concern about responding aggressively to outside offers. In some settings, there is evidence that certain demographic groups are more likely to seek and receive retentions than others. This means that having more aggressive retention policies can benefit certain groups and create a different type of inequity over time. Our tabulations of recent years show little evidence that men, for example, are more likely than women to receive retention increases at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������. While this will remain an important item to monitor, it does not create obvious concerns with focusing on a stronger response to outside competitive offers for our faculty.��

6. Communicate guidelines for supplemental pay beyond base salary 

Significant work by the task force subcommittees identified clear needs for greater information visibility and transparency on the amounts and justifications for supplemental pay for faculty. My office has begun work to further develop and communicate these guidelines. Most recently, my team has surveyed deans around their practices for providing summer salary at the start of appointments for tenure track and teaching faculty, and for summer salary more generally. We will continue this work in the coming months.��

7. Develop and communicate guidance for deans re: teaching loads 

I have begun conversations with the deans about developing clear principles that drive their decision-making and policies around teaching loads. The leadership team in Arts and Sciences has begun working on a set of shared principles for determining teaching loads in that college. I have charged a subset of deans with leading a project to develop and articulate a similar set of principles across all colleges. The goal here is not to push uniformity across colleges, but to have transparency and a clear rationale for necessary differences and expectations on teaching loads. A major obstacle to the work of rationalizing teaching loads is the lack of systematic data on both salaries and workload of teaching faculty from peer institutions. My budget team, in collaboration with campus financial and budget units, has begun that work, primarily using data from an AAUP survey, and we will continue to explore what is available. I expect an initial guidance document based on this work to be completed in fall 2026.��

Concluding thoughts: Coordinating an overall approach 

Each of these steps will move us closer to a more competitive and equitable approach to faculty compensation at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������, but achieving that goal will take some time. The major funding increments will be rolled out over the next three years, after which we will need to re-assess our position relative to our peers. The proposed investments are feasible within our current and projected resources and will represent significant progress toward our goals.��

As we move through these efforts, a critical need is to recognize that individual elements of this strategy may at times appear to be at odds with one another. For example, a unit that moves quickly on structural adjustments to faculty salaries toward greater competitiveness with our peers may face increased equity concerns temporarily. Units that find ways to act more aggressively on competitive retention packages may also have other adjustments that need to be made for faculty with similar profiles.��

It is important that we view this as a multi-year process of adjustment and improvement, and not allow concern about one compensation objective to impede progress on another. Over time, by devoting these resources and adopting practices that strengthen competitiveness, improve retention, enhance equity, and increase transparency, we can make meaningful progress across all of these dimensions. In doing so, we will take lasting steps toward securing a stronger competitive position for ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ in attracting and retaining faculty who can carry out our unique and vital academic mission.

Ann Stevens
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs