0 The Gatekeepers of Higher Education

A recent survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed may provide some insights into the sorting mechanism that today's version of higher education is known for.  How does higher education perpetuate inequality?  Let's take a look at the admissions practices of our most accessible, affordable, bachelor's-degree granting institutions-- America's public universities.

Admissions officers at public universities reported:

• Distributing at least some financial aid as a reward, rather than focusing their limited budgets on helping the neediest students afford college. Fully 31% (nearly as many as the private universities) said they are increasing their effort to distribute such "merit" aid, which studies have shown flows disproportionately to advantaged students whose propensities to graduate college are already very high.  There's very little return on investment for such spending and yet 44% of these folks said merit aid was a "good use" of institutional resources. Why? Largely because they help improve the "profile" of entering students-- an input, not an output, but one administrators continue to be obsessed with, since the American public continues to buy the myth that most colleges create great students rather than merely enroll great students.  After all, more than one-third of these admissions officers said that senior administrators, board members, or development officers got involved in trying to influence their decisions!
• Going whole hog after out-of-state students, transfer students, and minority students but doing far less to recruit first-generation students, adult students, or veterans-- those for whom college opportunities are most likely to be in-state and life transforming.
• Largely disagreeing with the notion that promising minority students with otherwise low test scores should be admitted to college. Compared to their peers, about half of whom felt this was a good idea, only 39% of admissions officers at public universities agreed.  But they were more likely than their peers to feel just fine about admitting athletes with sub-par test scores!
• Adhering to the mistaken belief that test scores predict college success, or are otherwise a good tool for admissions.  Only 9% of public university admissions officers feel their schools should go test-optional, compared to 18% of admissions officers overall. So 91% like the standardized tests, but just 84% find admissions essays helpful.  Hmmm...

All I can say is, let's hope this survey is bunk. It had a 15% response rate, which is pretty lousy.  But if it's right, we need to pay a lot more attention to the professionals who are putting our policies into practice. It seems they have some opinions of their own...

0 Making Income-Contingent Loans Cost Effective

Check out an op-ed that I co-authored with my doctoral student Robert Kelchen on income-contingent loans, over at the Chronicle.   Then, be sure to check out Robert's new blog!

0 The Next UW-Madison Chancellor... Tommy Thompson?

The search for a new chancellor of UW-Madison is now underway.  This is a critical search for our community, as changes on multiple fronts threaten to destroy the aspects of Madison that makes it such a wonderful place to teach and learn.

It's absolutely imperative that YOU get involved.  Start by attending one of the upcoming sessions on campus, hosted by the search and screen committee.  Think about nontraditional candidates-- consider those who've worked hard to take leadership roles as faculty in public higher education, for example, but not yet worked as a high-level administrator.  Think outside the typical research university model.  Think outside of the usual corporate models.

Sift and winnow.  Others already are.  Word reached me late last week that some people are thinking "nontraditional" indeed, and seeking to follow the lead of Indiana by bringing this guy into the mix.  Does Tommy meet your definition of a top-notch UW-Madison chancellor? If not, what do you plan to do about it?

Think. Act. Get involved. Don't sit still and wait for it to simply "happen" to us. Please.

0 Five Ways to Enhance the Effectiveness of HR Design

This fall marks my ninth academic year at UW–Madison. During my time here I’ve experienced our human resources system in many ways—as a new mother seeking a maternity leave (twice), as a temporarily disabled employee in need of a leave, as a frustrated faculty member seeking a raise, and multiple times as the director of a large research project trying to hire and retain qualified classified and academic staff. I know firsthand that the system needs to change in order to realize our campus goals of equity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

That is why I have taken seriously the HR Design team’s request for input from shared governance units, spending significant time studying the plan, and commenting on it in multiple venues. I think further adjustments to the current plan are required, because my own knowledge of higher education reform efforts and the scholarly literature on work and organizations suggests that as currently formulated it will have significant unintended consequences, eroding some of what we value most about our university. Therefore, I am providing five recommendations for revising the plan so that UW–Madison’s approach to the management of human resources continues to reflect an ethos that prioritizes egalitarianism over ego, and recognizes that our greatest resource is our communal passion for and commitment to our work, rather than the competitive yet aimless striving for prestige that has overcome many of our peer institutions.

Recommendation 1:Expand the plan’s current living wage provisions to include workers at businesses receiving university contracts of $5,000 or more and student hourly employees.

The current plan calls for the implementation of a living wage policy that omits two groups: student hourly workers and contracted employees. Including contracted employees would bring the policy in line with the City of Madison’s living wage provisions. Their exclusion creates an incentive for the university to outsource more functions, which may increase efficiency but will also erode job security. In addition, providing a living wage to contractors and students helps ensure at least a modicum of equity among all people working in our community.

           

Recommendation 2: Revise the compensation philosophy guiding the plan to make internal equity and collective performance the primary, rather than secondary, compensation drivers.

The current plan repeatedly emphasizes enhancing “individual potential, opportunity, and achievement,” which, while important, overlooks the critical role played by teamwork in providing high-quality learning experiences and producing innovative research. The 21^st century research university increasingly requires collaboration across disciplines and units, creating work environments where people trained in different disciplines (and who are thus part of different labor markets) work alongside each other. The plan briefly acknowledges this, but the compensation strategies it outlines focus first on the role of market competitiveness (noting that it will be a factor in establishing compensation) and only secondly (and far less frequently) on internal equity. The roles of these factors should be reversed in each section. After all, the compensation work team (which, as an aside, did not include any non-administrator faculty members) recommended that market value be considered in setting wages but said nothing about de-valuing or de-emphasizing equity (although it appears the committee did not consider alternative, equity-focused models of compensation at all). It is reasonable that the committee wanted to add market-based pay to the mix of compensation drivers. However, the extent to which this driver should be emphasized, and how to assess cross-departmental collaborations taking into account diverse disciplinary “markets,” are very complex questions deserving a more careful work.

Recommendation 3: Require mandatory training for all managers tasked with setting employee compensation and/or benefits.

Given the highly decentralized nature of the plan, managers will almost always be faculty members, and yet most would acknowledge that they are not trained for or comfortable with performing human resources functions. The compensation work group noted this among its concerns, stating, “Another concern is that not all faculty and staff supervisors will assume responsibility to fairly, objectively and consistently implement formal performance evaluation processes.” This is too important a role to be left to the untrained, but the efficacy of this plan relies exclusively on their responsible participation in the training. It is especially important to give managers guidance about how to conduct and utilize market analyses in departments and units where scholars from different disciplines work side by side (thus creating much potential for internal inequity), and also to train them in assessing the comparable worth of similar yet unequal tasks. The current plan notes that a lack of training for managers was named as a problem in the listening sessions and mentions the training of hiring managers, but says nothing about rigorously training those who set compensation.

Recommendation 4: Alter the recommendation in the plan associated with shared governance to focus on joint decision making rather than advice and input.

The recommendations on shared governance, particularly with respect to development of the compensation pay plan and changes in benefits (leave, insurances, etc.) stress that the shared governance institutions, specifically that of the newly created University Staff, provide advice and input to the administration afterthe plan is developed. This is not indicative of a collaborative or shared governance model. While at many institutions shared governance merely requires the involvement of faculty, staff, and students as listeners and occasional speakers, this is not the historic practice at Madison and shared decision-making responsibilities should not be eroded through changes to language in specific plans like these.

Recommendation 5: Require mandatory performance reporting and accountability metrics for the new HR System.

At minimum, the plan should explain which reports should be produced and what consequences will be associated with performance. For example, public annual reports should assess changes in internal equity (between faculty and staff, among groups with regard to gender and race), faculty and staff turnover, and the absolute and relative number of positions that are university employees versus contractors. These reports should be presented to both the Faculty Senate and the Academic Staff Assembly (and the shared governance body of the University Staff), and the senior leadership council should describe what responses to the plan will take place should inequity, turnover, outsourcing, or other negative unintended consequences of the new HR design emerge or worsen.

0 Equity, Performance, and Employee Compensation

Every employee at UW-Madison believes they deserve to be paid more, and the vast majority are right. It's time we recognize and begin to address the fact that most workers across Wisconsin are underpaid--in UW and far beyond. Increasing compensation for everyone in the bottom half of the income distribution should be a state and national priority, especially given the evident and long-lasting consequences of widening income inequality.

Unfortunately, the HR Design plan at UW-Madison is nearly silent on the issue of raising compensation for all currently underpaid employees. Instead, it focuses on how compensation levels will be determined and how raises will be distributed when money is available.  It does nothing whatsoever to make sure more money is available. Remember that-- don't allow the desire for more pay to lead you to blindly accept the terms of a plan that doesn't bring more pay but rather changes the terms on which you are paid.  

The biggest change related to compensation in the HR Design is the new and explicit attention to "market competitiveness" in setting compensation levels and determining raises. This is a response to the status quo, which has been identified as a problem with this statement:

"State law prohibits UW–Madison from giving unclassified employees performance-based pay raises unless they are part of an annual pay plan—and there has not been a pay plan in four years" (p. 24).  

What exactly is the problem?  Is it that performance pay cannot be given outside of annual pay plans? Or is it that there hasn't been a pay plan in 4 years? These are two separate issues, and should be tackled separately.  The first is about pay equity, and the second is about the consequences of austerity agendas.  Current discussions conflate these issues-- employees are upset about the lack of a pay plan and thus some are desperate to agree to anything that leads to pay, for anyone, no matter the consequence. That's a recipe for disaster.

It seems the HR team has concluded that the former issue must be addressed and therefore proposed mechanisms for awarding performance pay even in the absence of a pay plan by calling for a model that "balances market competitiveness and internal equity."  Essentially, instead of developing a new model for UW-Madison that leverages scarce resources for fair and humane treatment of all employees, this model opens the door to further growth in salary inequities across and within units.  It does this by promoting salary increases based at least partly on market competitiveness without explicitly requiring attention to internal equity, as part of both the compensation philosophy and the roles and responsibilities of managers.

The reasoning provided for this approach is fallible. We are told that employees want their pay based on market competitiveness-- yet the survey questions utilized in the employee polls ask about these issues in isolation. A better approach would ask employees to rank their preferences-- a pay plan distributed equitably, with some additional pay for performance; pay distributed inequitably, with no overall pay plan provided, etc. In other words, when presented with a false choice, it isn't at all surprising that employees choose to protect themselves. But what we're given here isn't our only option.

A review of extant research leads me to conclude that pay for performance has uneven effects in environments like UW-Madison. The main issue at Madison and across Wisconsin is that pay levels are low-- not that they aren't tied to performance.  Tying pay to a combination of performance and equity will reduce, not enhance, the transparency of the compensation process, and thus likely increase the sense of injustice that already pervades campus.  Basing pay on an unspecified assessment of market value will lead employees to feel even more left out of the process, making them even unhappier. In other words, it is likely that HR Design will do nothing to improve the feelings among UW employees that their compensation levels are unfair and inappropriate.   It may even make things worse.

As an alternative, I therefore propose the following revisions to the HR Design's compensation plans:

(1) Make internal equity a priority in the setting of compensation by describing it as an explicit priority central to the compensation philosophy and part of the compensation function's roles and responsibilities.  Educational institutions are unique environments that place a priority on collaboration, including across disciplines, and it is for the good of our teaching and research at UW-Madison that we be allowed to prioritize internal equity when distributing any and all forms of compensation.  This is an essential revision of state statutes and one we should fight for.

(2) Clearly define the terms "market," "performance," and "merit" in the plan and delineate among them. Be clear, which types of pay result in base increases, and which do not?

(3) Provide explicit guidance to managers working with employees who work across units or in interdisciplinary settings. These areas are where pay based on markets are likely to do the most harm - imagine the sociologist teaching alongside the economist in the same department, where the latter professor (most often a male) out-earns the former (usually a female) 2 to 1. It happens under our current system, and is demonstrably counterproductive. These are the types of problems we can and should fix in order to enhance our ability to retain workers and ensure their flourishing.

(4) Include all employees-- included contracted employees--in the plan to provide a living wage.
 The only people who will clearly benefit from HR Design in terms of current base pay are those at the bottom of the pay scale who will remain university staff and will now receive a living wage under this plan.  The number of people meeting that description is not mentioned in the plan.  That number should be considered in relation to the likely number of jobs that are currently university staff jobs and will instead be contracted out to save the university money. The City of Madison pays living wages to all contractors on contract over $5,000.

UW-Madison should take the lead in reducing income inequality in Wisconsin, not exacerbating it. We are national leaders when it comes to our collective devotion to our work, and that strong intrinsic motivation should be leveraged whenever and wherever possible.  No, it should not be exploited--as it now is-- to justify underpaying us. But do not let the poor practices of our neighbors compel us to lose what's great about our community--we have no desire to become a "winner take all" society.

0 HR Design Meeting: The Community Speaks

My sources tell me that Varsity Hall in Union South was completely packed for today's meeting on HR Design.  At this "informational session" the HR team spoke for 60 minutes, leaving just 30 minutes for Q & A.

During that time, 18 people were able to ask questions.  Here's the list-- some people repeated a question when the first iteration did not get a satisfactory answer  I'm told the most frequent responses  from the team were "There is no easy answer" and "There is no one answer."

1. If there is a perception of hierarchy [between the academic and classified staff], why has the faculty not been included in this process?
2. In which category (academic or the new university staff) do the trades fit?  Will pay increases (living wage?) be honored?
3. How was data used in these plans?  
4. What are the current plans for staff diversity?
5. What does governance mean for university (classified) staff? 
6. How are salaries affected by the compensation plans (flexibility and living wages)? 
7. What is university staff governance?  It is compared to the academic staff version, but many of us don't know what that means.
8. What are the advantages of moving or staying in the current classified staff system?
9. Which changes apply to student hourlies?  Does the living wage apply?
10. What is the difference between a student living wage and the living wage mentioned for other staff?
11. The faculty are managers, but have no training.  How will they be held accountable?
12. How will employees and managers be held accountable?
13. The HR committee needs to realize faculty are not interested in HR and the hierarchy will not disappear.  They are overwhelmed and have no time for administrative tasks.  They need more support.  You can't expect that type of cultural change from a training.
14. What is the minimum living wage?
15. What if these changes doesn't get approved in time, and implementation is held up?
16. How are retiring staff affected?
17. How is collective bargaining affected?
18. What assurance do we have that merit pay is not another form of favoritism?  We need a system that is fair to everyone.

These are good questions. I wonder how many people on campus even know this process is occurring...

0 Just the "Facts" on HR Design

Yesterday's Faculty Senate meeting at UW-Madison provided a wonderful illustration of how the cycle of widening economic inequality is regenerated through the actions of colleges and universities.

A Word Cloud Illustration of the Terms Contained in HR Design's Strategic Plan Components.  Word size is relative to frequency in document. 

Here's a thumbnail sketch of the process leading to the prioritization of markets over equity as depicted above. (In case you can't find it, "equity" is that tiny word hidden under "Job" on the left, above)

1. Wisconsin's conservative politicians slash investments in public higher education. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reduction of human capital formation via public institutions.  The following steps are also required.
2. Public colleges and universities struggle to respond. They have multiple options, one of which is to fight the disinvestment while protecting its most vulnerable programs, employees, and students, but instead they adopt a suggestion provided by fiscally conservative liberals: turn to the market for ideas and support!
3. University administrators promote a new set of principles for the allocation of resources based on market rationales-- efficiency, effectiveness, and performance! Of course equity will be preserved, they say, but that's "up to you and your managers-- the power is all yours and the devil is in the details!" Yep, sure is.
4. These new principles and plans are developed "in collaboration" with the very few faculty, staff, and students who, in the midst of great economic and time constraints, are actually available for these discussions.  The "opportunity" for a new model is repeatedly emphasized as an inherently good thing, a wise thing, and one that will help us "help ourselves." These discussions result in a set of stylized proposals resting on unquestioned assumptions.
5. The plans are presented to "stakeholders."  They are described as based on "facts" of unquestionable validity and declared "not part of an effort to corporatize the university."  Such declarations are made without justification-- but because stakeholders are insufficiently equipped to respond, time-constrained, exhausted from overwork, and accustomed to being ignored by the administration, few offered any questions.
6. Thus, even the faculty-- purportedly the best-educated stakeholders-- sit quietly.  Unquestioning. No sifting and winnowing.  Happy to have someone else solve their "problems," especially if it means money will soon enter their pockets.
7. And with that, university administration has "engaged" its publics in the relevant discussions and can proceed with its plans.  It will pass the new agenda through all channels and deliver it, fully rubber-stamped, back to the gleeful Legislature.
8. Thus, we in higher education have "helped ourselves." 
9. Fast forward 5 years:  in many units, the gap in pay between research staff employed in high-demand fields and those assisting with teaching and learning will have grown.  Substantial numbers of jobs will move from employee to contractor status, since the new system guarantees a living wage only to employees-- not contractors-- and as we know, living wages are expensive! The number of mid-level bureaucrats (managers) on campus will have doubled and increased their power, as they now control budgets through their special analyses of employees' market value.  But it will be impossible to document all of these changes since the data will continue to be held in an administrative unit that decides how it displays results and is only required to respond to request from administrators, not employees. 

But don't worry, folks, this isn't corporatization.

And never fear, since shared governance will continue to reign.  If by that term, you mean that employees will have "input."


Notes:

1. Bob Lavigna pronounced the HR plan "not corporatization" three times during yesterday's Faculty Senate meeting.
2. While Lavigna said that shared governance meant "joint decision-making" (in response to a question I raised) the HR plan never mentions joint decision-making and instead mentions "input" 19 times.

0 More Questions on HR Design

In advance of this afternoon's meeting, I received this very helpful document from the Wisconsin University Union, which summarizes the HR Design plan elements and how they compare to current practice, while raising some critical questions about each element.

Here are some questions that I think are especially deserving of response:

• Will the university staff assembly, created by HR Design, preempt or potentially undermine the re-establishment of unions?  
• Why aren’t all contractors (over $5K) included in the living wage provisions, consistent with the City of Madison policy? UW has shifted to using contractors for custodial and food-service positions, and currently pays custodians just $8/hour. 
• What provisions prevent a hiring authority from defining the “employing unit” as so limited as to “force” a layoff? 
• What is the evaluation plan to assess the impacts of these radical changes?

0 Concrete Suggestions to Improve HR Design

This evening my colleague Bruce Thomadsen, professor of medical physics at UW-Madison, shared several concrete recommendations for improving the HR Design plan.  I think highly of his suggestions, and thus with permission I am summarizing the most critical ones here:

1. Affirm the continuation of genuine shared governance, a pillar of UW, in this plan.  The language implies that employees will advise on the implementation of benefits programs, but this is far weaker than the current status of shared governance at our university.  Decision-making must be shard.
2. Amend the plan to clearly state that academic staff have the right to due process with respect to all University actions detrimental to their jobs. This is not currently clear, especially with regard to layoffs.
3. Provide much more detail on the implementation of the layoff procedures. In particular, explain how the new system will increase, rather than decrease, job security.
4. The plan says that hiring managers will set salaries.  Clarify how this will be accomplished, and be specific about the types of information that will be considered and in particular the role that market studies will play.
5. The plan discusses the challenges of creating a system of job titles and compensation levels that match the titles. The difficulties and process are listed, but it is not clear that the results will eliminate the problems encountered frequently in providing adequate compensation for long-time, experienced employees, where only by changing a job title (and, therefore the job description) can increased compensation be provided. Often, such changes are not possible or allowed. The solution is to uncouple the job title from compensation to give flexibility and establish compensation based on qualifications and performance. This would eliminate the problem of adjusting the compensation for persons at the top of their job classification’s pay range. 
6. The Guiding Principles for HR Design aimed to eliminate the disparity where 12-month faculty receive 22 leave days immediately upon hire while university staff start with a low number and work up to this through seniority and promotion. Instead, all employees should start with the full number of leave days. But this plan apparently lowers the beginning leave days for new faculty, moving in the opposite of the intended direction. To fix this, change the plan: all full-time University employees should have 22 vacation and personal leave days, with leave for employees with 9-month appointments prorated by ¾.
7. Under this plan, it is not clear what will happen to the conversion of accrued sick leave at retirement. Clarify this, leaving sick leave separate from other vacation and personal leave, and the current sick-leave accrual policy unchanged.
8. Eliminate the provisions to change rules regarding transferring positions. The plan eliminates the current right for employees to return to their original positions if a transfer to a different position does not work. The report states, “Also, by reducing the risk associated with accepting a new position, the current policy also reduces the incentive for both the employee and the hiring manager/supervisor to do effective onboarding and work together to address any challenges in the probationary period.” This opinion neglects to consider that the transferring employee wants to make the change and therefore has a stake in making the new situation work. The hiring manager’s incentive would likely try hard to fit the transferring employee into the working environment to avoid repeating the hiring process.

0 Human Resource Directors and Employee Unions

Tomorrow afternoon, the Faculty Senate at UW-Madison will hear from Bob Lavigna, the institution's Human Resources Director. Lavigna will be discussing HR Design, a new plan I've covered several times recently on this blog. It's a controversial proposal, in part because it shifts the focus on setting compensation from internal equity towards external markets.  It also reduces some of the benefits held by classified staff, who are currently unionized, and for whom perks like substantial vacation time slightly dull the pain stemming from the terrible wages.

I was therefore intrigued when this morning I delved into my Inside Higher Ed backlog of reading and found the results of a brand new national survey of HR directors and their opinions about the future directions universities need to take.  The results help to at least partially set the broader stage on which HR Design is occurring.   (Partially: the response rate for this survey is 15% and with just 324 participants, 42 of whom were at public research universities, who knows if Madison is represented.)

Here are some key highlights related to HR Design:

• Concerns about salary equity are losing ground. Nearly 32% of HR Directors at public research universities said they are paying less attention to equity in faculty and staff salaries than they did five years ago, and just 17% are attending to those issues more often, despite the strong likelihood (given austerity practices) that inequities are growing.

• Almost all HR Directors take a dim view of unions. Close to 90% of HR Directors at public research universities contend that unions inhibit their ability to re-deploy people and define job tasks, discourage pay for performance, and inappropriately protect poor performing employees.   Less than 1/3 of such Directors acknowledge unions' demonstrable roles in securing better salaries and benefits and ensuring fair treatment of employees.

• Few HR Directors seem able to ground their assessments in data. Just 28.6% of HR Directors at public research universities report that they have good data on employee performance, productivity, and satisfaction, and only 21.4% say they use such data in campus planning and policy decisions.  (Sidenote: Oh. My. God.)

• And yet somehow, HR Directors are able to attribute low morale among employees to recent budget cuts. 74% of those at public research institutions agree that budget cuts did major damage to staff rationale, and 20-30% say their offices are unfairly blamed for cuts to employee benefits and services and even layoffs.  The frequency of these statements is twice as common at public research institutions as compared to elsewhere.

These will undoubtedly form a nice backdrop to tomorrow's discussion. I'm hoping Lavigna keeps his statement short and sweet, to allow plenty of time for questions. I'm told this hasn't been the case at recent campus events; for example at last week's Academic Staff Assembly meeting the members were not given responses to ASEC's previously issued comments.  But I'm sure tomorrow will be different-- faculty like to talk, at least as much as we like to listen.