What employees (publicly) make

author: john loeppky | editor-in-chief

Money stats for days/Jeremy Davis

Bolded items can be clicked to send you to the relevant article or data

Checking in with faculty and staff earnings

Following the previous reporting of Ashley Martin of the Leader-Post, and as the University of Regina and the Faculty Association find themselves in the midst of bargaining, this is an analysis of the public earnings of the University of Regina’s employees. The date used is from a University of Regina human resources report published in July of 2018 listing all of those who make over $100,000 on the main campus. A few notes on the data before we jump in.

For those who hold multiple appointments – say, as a counselor as well as a psychology lecturer, they are sorted by the area in which they work the majority of the time. The ESL department and La Cité have been combined, while the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research has been combined with the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, because their students are graduate students. Those we know no longer teach or otherwise work at the University of Regina have been deleted from the data set, and coaches have been included in the calculation for the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies, rather than in the administration/staff category.

To begin, here’s a data table of the number of employees from each faculty included in the 457 qualifiers. This total includes base salary + research stipends and market incentives.

For those of us who are super visual, here’s a pie graph illustrating in the percentage of the total amount of money.

Now, any data set like this is going to be top-heavy. So, here’s a frequency distribution. In the table below, the first number, 46, refers to the number of employees who sit between $100,000 and $105,000 and the date is set up in that way all the way through.

Visually, that looks like this:

So, what can we draw from this, other than the fact that sorting the list provided publicly by the University of Regina takes upward of five hours to sort by faculty? Well, there’s a sharp drop in the higher payment bands. In the highest band in the data, between $230,000 and $370,000, only one, david Gregory (Nursing), is a faculty member – with a slight caveat that a number of administrators (including Tom Chase and Vianne Timmons) technically have or have had academic appointments in the past. While administration/staff come third in total percentage, that isn’t the entire story (cue an economics major smiling while a history major cries about statistics being damn lies). Here’s a graph showing the average salary – keeping in mind that this result is slightly skewed by the number of employees in their various areas, such as the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) having only three members on the list. Hurrah for outliers.

In raw numbers, the data looks like this:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a high percentage of employees on this list fall in the two smallest bands (23.6% making between $100,000 and $110,000). In comparison 33 people (7%) make between $175,000 and $370,000.00. According to a MacLean’s article rooted in StatsCan data, across the three categories of academic appointments, the average is $129,316 and change, placing them in the top half in data available in Canada, right between the University of New Brunswick and Athabasca University. More data would be needed to confirm the MacLean’s analysis in relation to the list provided.

In a report published by the Office Resource Planning, some interesting findings bear out when compared to the list of those making $100,000+, albeit requiring some assumptions due to the data available, as the years don’t match up and new data is not yet available. According to the 2017 report, citing self-identification and with the wide-ranging statistical and social challenge that self identifying as being a minority can have a tangible negative impact on employment, 2.7% of the University of Regina workforce identifies as Aboriginal, 0.9% as being disabled, 9.6% as being from a visible minority group, and 45.8% as women, all of which fall below provincial targets by an average of 6.1%, according to the provincial human rights commission. Again, these statistics only apply to main campus academic workplace employees, and not those at the federated colleges.

So, what does that look like, visually and in raw numbers when compared to the list we started with? I’m glad you asked.

Visually, because I’m eating pie right now as I write this, here that is.

Now, this data is skewed by the University main campus only (comparatively) being 0.2% off of provincial targets – as per their own analysis, when comes to women in academic positions. If we export the date while lumping women in with the other category (sorry, folks), this is what it looks like:

There are a million and one analyses that can be pulled from this data. We’ve made our data publicly available – pivot table and all – thanks to a contributor who wished not to be named. You can find it on our website. We welcome any additional data, particularly in areas where this analysis could use further expansion.