Another Day, Another Dollar

Dartmouth's $25 million payroll

STATISTICS , which only fool some of the people some of the time, tell us that a college education is an easier path to comfort and affluence than the school of hard knocks. Catfish Hunter, whose strong right arm is prized by the New York Yankees to the sum of $3 million, is an exception. The irony is that someone who works for a college - even if he has gone to college, the usual starting point on the road to wealth these days - isn't going to get near the pot of gold. Former Yale classicist Eric Segal, whose off-hours labors gave birth to millions of little love stories, and Bear Bryant, whose machine turns out millions of large football players, are exceptions.

With 2,161 full-time employees, Dartmouth has the largest non-government work force in the state of New Hampshire - a far cry from 1770 when Eleazar Wheelock served as his own faculty, staff, and administration. Today, in fact, counting the faculty and everyone else, the College employs nearly one worker for every two students. Last fiscal year's payroll totaled $24.8 million, 50.9 percent of the College budget. That sum provides many material comforts, but nobody is getting rich on it. On the bright side, in spite of the inroads of inflation, Dartmouth wages and salaries are far better than they were even a few years ago, thanks mostly to the largesse of the Third Century Fund and other alumni giving.

Faculty salaries have risen considerably in the past few years. The average pay for a full professor at Dartmouth today is $23,145, up from $12,700 ten years ago. Associate professors earn $17,090 on the average, up from $10,800, and assistant professors earn $13,000, up from $8,670. Faculty compensation, especially in the full professor category, has closed a gap that existed ten years ago between Dartmouth and comparable colleges in the northeast.

Service employees at the College, who number 527 and form the only group represented by a union (although not all belong), have seen their pay scale more than double since Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union (A.F.L.C.I.O.-affiliated) was established. Clarence Burrill, director of employee relations and the College's liaison with the union, admits that "we've got to give the union credit." Janitors and groundsworkers earn an average of $3.31 per hour, which works out to $132.40 for a 40-hour week . and $6,885 per year. The union represents most Buildings and Grounds workers and non-student help at the Dartmouth Dining Association.

"There's never even been any discussion of a strike," says Burrill, who notes that fringe benefits for union workers include fully paid life insurance, 16 annual personal and sick-leave days, seven paid holidays, and a fully funded pension plan Typically, the pension plus social security provides a retiree with 70 per cent of the average of his last three years' salary.

Rather like the civil service, administrative positions are graded according to complexity and responsibility of the job. In ascending status from one to eight the grades carry salaries ranging from $7,900 to $33,075. The largest group of administrators is in Grade 4, with anaverage salary of about $14,700. "They can move around the country, they're mobile, so there is national competition for their talent," says personnel director Arthur Lindberg, himself having moved from Brown to Dartmouth.

As with the faculty, the College pays the equivalent of up to 16 per cent of an administrator's salary into a pension fund and provides amounts ranging between $1,000 and $2,400 in college tuition aid for each child. There are, to be sure, additional perquisites, such as free privileges at the library, discounted prices on athletic tickets, and use of the athletic facilities. On the other hand, administrators and members of the faculty have to pay $69 for annual parking permits (the fee is reduced to $23 for staff and service employees).

The College reviews the salaries of its 270 administrators annually, and from time to time compares selected Dartmouth salaries to those at Brown and Princeton. "These schools provide the best basis for comparison," says Lindberg. But he concedes that the science of determining administration salaries is highly uncertain: "The best we can do is to obtain figures for what other schools are paying [for a similar position] and make sure we're not at the bottom or at the top." Harvard, he adds, is generally at the top.

There is no similar comparison made for staff and service salaries. As Lindberg explains, "It's fallacious to compare staff salaries in Hanover, New Hampshire, to staff salaries in New York City or New Haven. Instead, for staff and service people, we look at the Upper Valley labor pool." The staff category includes clerical help, library workers, and laboratory assistants. The personnel office at the College has conducted a survey in the Upper Valley and has pegged its salary schedule to the curve that was developed in the survey. The overall average wage for staff "employees, who normally work a 371/2-hour week, is $3.49 per hour. Typical hourly wages are $2.51 for a library clerk, $3.07 for a senior secretary, $3.51 for an administrative assistant, $3.76 for a video engineer, and $4.02 for a research assistant.

One man not satisfied with the College salary structure is Seaver Peters, director of athletics. Peters has for years been lobbying for better compensation for coaches. "The coaching salaries at Dartmouth are second division in the Ivy Group, and the Ivy group does very poorly nationally," he says, adding that it is hard to attract topflight coaching talent given the College's salary structure. "Many outstanding secondary school coaches make more than our people," according to Peters, who cites a coach at Dartmouth who took a pay cut when he came from Hanover High School. "Now that's just not right."

Peters proposes that there be "a relationship between faculty salaries and coaching salaries." The average head coach, he says, earns $14,800 a year on a nine-month, academic-year basis, the same basis used to figure faculty salaries. He feels that a head coach should make "something between what a full and associate professor makes," or about $20,000 a year. Assistant coaches, who now earn an average of $11,500, should fall somewhere between assistant and associate professors, which translates to about $15,000.

This is not to say that the DCAC rigidly adheres to its salary structure. In certain circumstances, "We have been known to go over the grade level assigned for a position," acknowledged Peters, alluding to the salary for former football coach Bob Blackman. He says that such exceptions are rare, but notes that Coach Jake Crouthamel "gets a College house" rentfree as a fringe benefit. "It's at our insistence." says Peters, explaining that the house is useful for entertaining recruits for the football program.

Faculty salary scales also become flexible in certain circumstances, according to William Durant, executive officer of the faculty. The minimum starting salary for an assistant professor is $11,000 a year, he says, but "depending on the idiosyncratic behavior of the discipline and the market, we sometimes raise that minimum salary significantly." As an example, Durant cites the Department of Economics. Economists are in great demand these days with business, government, and universities all competing for a limited number of new Ph.D.s. An assistant professor of economics who is leaving Dartmouth this year because he was not promoted to tenured rank claims that he will earn four or five thousand dollars more per year at another institution.

Overall, average compensation for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth is above the national average for full and associate professors but below average for assistant professors. Total annual compensation (salary plus fringe benefits) averages $27,300 for full Professors, $19,900 for associate professors, and $14,400 for assistant professors. The American Association of University Professors reports that the average compensation at 1,523 colleges and universities is $23,500, $17,800, and $14,700 for full, associate, and assistant professors, respectively.

The Dartmouth administration believes that more relevant comparisons can be made with Amherst, Brandeis, Brown, Princeton, Rochester, and Wesleyan. These schools have been chosen because they appear to provide an academic environment that is roughly similar to Dartmouth. Harvard, Yale, and MIT are excluded because of their graduate study and research orientation. Dartmouth faculty compensation, which was considerably behind faculty compensation at the other schools in the full professor range just ten years ago, is now competitive. Compensation for associate professors is in the middle rank, while assistant professors' earnings at Dartmouth have slumped toward the bottom of the comparative scale. But the faculty, which has a committee studying these matters, will no doubt agree that its rewards are improved compared to 20 years ago when the College pocketbook was "stretched" to provide Dartmouth's new chairman of the Mathematics Department, Professor John Kemeny, with a salary of $6,000.