Job offers promising higher salaries and those from more prestigious departments or institutions were among the most-cited reasons University of Maryland faculty might leave the university, according to a survey.
About 28 percent of 854 tenured and tenure-track faculty members said they were likely to leave this university in the next two years, according to a spring 2015 Faculty Work Environment Survey from the ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence. According to a 2011 survey, about 31 percent of 488 tenure-track faculty respondents said they wanted to leave.
As of fall 2014, this university employed 1,567 tenured and tenure-track faculty, according to the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment.
Despite the survey results, less than 2 percent of faculty leave annually, ranging from a low of 10 faculty members leaving last year to a high of 24 in 2012, according to IRPA.
As key faculty members leave or become dissatisfied, departments and research are often hurt, Provost Mary Ann Rankin said
Of those likely to leave, 20.6 percent said it was because they were offered a higher salary elsewhere, while 14.3 percent said it was because they received “an offer from a more prestigious department or institution,” according to the survey.
“Our faculties have become targets for other universities,” said Wayne McIntosh, associate dean of the behavioral and social sciences college. “Every year it happens, where universities try to make efforts to recruit our faculty away from us.”
This university had one of the highest annual salaries for full professors in the 2014 academic year, according to an American Association of University Professors Compensation Survey study. The yearly average is $154,200, while at University of Wisconsin it is $128,100 and at University of Minnesota it is $135,300. At Johns Hopkins University, it is $154,700.
But this data does not factor in the cost of living, which can make a big difference, said John Barnshaw, an AAUP senior higher education research officer. Relative to other schools, living in College Park is generally more expensive than other Big Ten cities, such as Iowa City. Plus, the cost of living has been rising steadily, while professor salaries have not. A newer study might also complicate the issue, ADVANCE Program Director KerryAnn O’Meara wrote in an email. O’Meara is working on a report on exit interviews from the past four years. So far, she wrote, she found while some faculty note they plan to leave because of salary, fewer actually resign because of it. Meanwhile those who do leave cite their work environment as the reason.
There are issues with professor retention at any university, but one reason this university is slow to keep up is the lack of strong state funds to support the school and the University System of Maryland, Barnshaw said.
In January, this state’s Department of Budget and Management announced a $40.3 million cut to the system budget, translating into a $15.6 million cut for this university.
“The University of Maryland and the university system has been publicly funded over the last five years or so, but the University of Maryland’s state appropriations have gone down,” he said. “So the institutions have less money, and they can’t pay their faculty because their budget is being cut.”
As a result, professors often will search for other jobs with higher salaries or stronger programs to support their research, he said. The faculty work survey also found professors were more likely to want to leave if they received outside offers.
“They can only do so much when their budget is getting cut,” Barnshaw said.
Improving this university’s research programs’ reputation as a research facility could improve professor retention as well, and is one reason for the push to become a top-10 research institution, Rankin said.
The loss of professors is also evident to other faculty members — 82.6 percent of faculty members reported at least one colleague who left in the past three years, according to this year’s survey.
According to the 2015 study, 18.1 percent of respondents said a colleague had left the university to pursue a higher salary, while 12.3 percent said a colleague had left to work at a more prestigious institution.
The information studies college lost two professors last year, professor Niklas Elmqvist said, which hurt its research department. They are just beginning to find replacements after a hiring freeze was implemented in December.
McIntosh said that just as businesses and companies look for new employees that can help them grow, this university and other campuses do the same thing.
“In some ways it’s a healthy thing because it means our faculty is organic, and it doesn’t become stagnant,” McIntosh said.
And while this university is losing faculty to other institutions, it’s also gaining them through the same patterns at other institutions.
Elmqvist, who began working at the information studies college last year after teaching at Purdue University, began looking for jobs at the same time he applied for tenure at Purdue so he could weigh his options.
Despite other offers, he chose this university because of the respect the program has and so his family could live near the water in Annapolis, he said.
“There was world-class research at Purdue, but there is also world class research here at Maryland,” he said. “Plus, more personal checkboxes being filled here than they are in the Midwest.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story contained several reporting errors. The story neglected to mention the response rate for the ADVANCE survey, which was about 53 percent. The survey only targeted tenured and tenure-track faculty. In addition, the story attributed statistics regarding professors’ colleagues’ reasons for leaving the university to faculty who reported they were likely to leave the university. This story has been updated to reflect these corrections.
