Fifteen months after university President Wallace Loh announced a 2 percent midyear tuition increase, a construction freeze and this campus’s slice of a $40.3 million cut to the University System of Maryland’s budget, much has changed.

In Gov. Larry Hogan’s second year in the state’s highest office, the General Assembly passed a $42.3 billion budget for fiscal year 2017 that boosts higher education spending by $78 million and limits tuition hikes at system schools to 2 percent.

The state budget — a 5 percent increase from the current fiscal year — includes an almost $450 million surplus and about $1.1 billion for a rainy day fund, representing continued progress in balancing state spending. After two years of hacking away at $5.1 billion in inherited structural deficits, Hogan and the state legislature have eliminated almost 90 percent of that sum.

That’s good news for this university, which during Loh’s tenure has embarked on a path of aggressive development in an effort to raise its profile as a top-tier research university. This year’s budget, in the wake of January 2015’s unprecedented squeeze, allows for responsible (if leaner) growth for a university still on the rise. It seems we’re back on the right track.

The buzz surrounding this university owes itself to a number of factors: newfound economic interest in College Park, generous targeted donations by former students and innovative partnerships with federal agencies, among others.

In light of all the headlines, though, it’s also important to remember that this university’s growth marks a united push from its more than 10,000 employees, who devote their professional lives to educating students and keeping a campus of tens of thousands running day in and day out.

This year, as it does every year, The Diamondback has requested and published data on these employees’ names, departments and salaries, compiling a living record of those who serve the campus. In this year’s salary guide, readers can find every person in the employ of the university, from Shuttle-UM instructors to Maryland men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon.

Online and in print, without altering the information provided to us by the university in a basic Excel spreadsheet, we’ve arranged this public data in an easily digestible format. If motivated to do so, readers could file a request to the university for the same information presented here by The Diamondback.

As with all of our news coverage, this year’s salary guide upholds our commitment to objectivity. We won’t suggest what conclusions readers should draw from the data, but we will provide it for the university community to browse and analyze as members see fit. As this university continues to strive for excellence, The Diamondback will continue to record the employment of those who helped it along the way.

Matt Schnabel, editor in chief, is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at diamondbackeditor@gmail.com.