State Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, recently introduced legislation which would offer 50 percent tuition discounts at Virginia public colleges and universities to the dependents of faculty members who have worked for at least seven years at those institutions. The goal of this proposal is to provide an alternative form of compensation to talented professors who have suffered from a statewide salary freeze for public employees since 2007.
Edwards and his legislative co-sponsor, Kaye Kory, D-Fairfax, deserve praise for recognizing the economic necessity of improving university faculty compensation. Their bill, however, does not offer equal consideration to all faculty since those without dependents would not benefit from the tuition discount. Understandably, Edwards and Kory are attempting to work within the political constraints imposed by a Republican-controlled General Assembly, but a much fairer approach to boosting faculty compensation would involve the state government appropriating significant additional funding for higher education which would allow universities to raise the salaries of all faculty members.
First, though, it is important to understand the rationale behind increasing faculty compensation. Not all faculty earn the six-figure salaries which are bandied about as examples of the cushy compensation packages provided to professors. For example, only four of the 15 faculty members in the University's department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures made more than $60,000 in 2011. This places them much closer to the U.S. median household income than it does to the life of luxury imagined by those who claim all faculty are grossly overpaid.
Moreover, public institutions such as the University compete for faculty in a free market where they must offer compensation packages which are competitive with those of other schools. According to a report issued last year by the American Association of University Professors, faculty salaries at private institutions have grown much faster than those at public institutions since the 1980s. This indicates the University already is lagging behind in terms of faculty compensation.
Thus, the bill offered by Edwards and Kory is aimed toward addressing a very real problem facing public institutions of higher education in Virginia. Yet it is an imperfect solution since it would only provide additional compensation to certain faculty members while arbitrarily ignoring others who are equally deserving. The obvious groups which would lose out are childless faculty and those with children who are older than 21, which is the cut-off for an individual to be eligible for the tuition discount. In addition, LGBTQ faculty could be excluded since the commonwealth does not allow unmarried couples to jointly adopt children. Thus, if a gay or lesbian faculty member's partner had an adopted child then that individual would not be eligible for the tuition discount.
Given these inequities in the bill's structure, it would be preferable for the state government to appropriate the money necessary for an across-the-board salary increase which would benefit all university faculty regardless of parental status or sexual orientation. This would, of course, cost significantly more money than merely providing tuition discounts to faculty dependents, but the General Assembly's irrational aversion to adjusting tax rates which have not been increased in decades is not a justifiable reason for falling back upon a faculty compensation proposal which overlooks many hardworking and equally deserving contributors to higher education.
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