When word comes of a new salary update, Reveille staffers quickly descend on Hill Memorial Library, visiting the special collections room to gain access to the document, scan it, and begin work on publishing the information it contains.
Once the document has been scanned, the data must be cleaned. This go around, there were two documents, and cleaning them also involved resolving the slight (but persistent) differences in spellings for names found between the two.
One would be amazed by how many different ways the same name can be spelled.
After the names were resolved, it was time to resolve numbers. A discrepancy soon jumped out, and we thought we might be on to something juicy – a “hidden” pay increase in the merit announcement. We found that a number of faculty had gotten raises that seemed larger than was publicly disclosed. Eventually, the budget office explained that some employees receive income from other sources, and wouldn’t be included in the normal results.
Having resolved that first, major discrepancy, work proceeded with pulling department information for the names we had. When the budget is published, it only includes the name of the employee, their job title, how many months a year they work, and their salary. To do meaningful analysis, the Reveille needed one more piece of data: Department.
To get departmental information the Reveille used a macro to run names from the salary database through the LSU online directory. One might expect near-flawless results, but the Reveille has found repeatedly that this is not the case. We improved on our results from the Spring, but we still only hit about 75 percent. Even when using a list of names generated by LSU to search the LSU directory, folks are missing.
Once we had the department and other contact info, we could compare departments. Now, the one thing we couldn’t do, is look at total dollar amounts. Everything we do is done via comparisons – percentages of total, rather than absolute figures. This is essential, because otherwise we would report totals that ignored any figures for employees who we couldn’t find in the LSU directory. We believe the missing names are randomly distributed, and therefore, that our percentage and relative comparisons are generally valid because those missing names even out. We do, however, attempt to only look at large departments – validity will quickly drop off with smaller sample sets.
The data is incredibly robust, for measuring such a seemingly innocuous thing: Salary. We also have grand plans for ways we will riff off of these results in the future. Once you have a great dataset like the salary database, new investigative possibilities begin to open up. For instance, are there any LSU faculty or staff on the list of child support deadbeats maintained by the state?
(We looked. There aren’t.)
That’s just one possibility. There are plenty of others, and we intend to publish one of those possibilities in the spring. Be on the lookout for our report on the Monarchist of LSU.
Data Facts
1) We use 9 and 12 month to distinguish between faculty and staff, but that’s an imperfect approach – there are 12-month professors who most students would view as faculty, but because they work 12 months a year, they get categorized as staff.
2) While the Reveille can’t back up the figures we provide for 2011 with any hardcopy evidence (they’re taken from an old file put out by the Reveille several years back) we noticed quite a few employees appear to have gotten substantial raises between now and then. Given that LSU has had a pay freeze for years, that’s a fascinating result. We would love to know if our 2011 figures are incorrect (we believe, for the most part, that they’re accurate) or if some staff have been receiving healthy raises in the midst of the freeze.
3) There were originally 168 departments, reduced by hand to 31 departments by Tesalon Felicien.
4) There were so many job titles the data staff eventually gave up on consolidating them, and left off on trying to compare how different job titles did with the merit increase.
5) Go check out the list of people who did not get the raise and you’ll see that the overwhelming majority of them have very even salaries. Apparently, some salaries, once established, remain pristine and untouched by the ravages of time.
6) We weren’t able to use our enrollment figures, because our departments don’t perfectly line up with the departments the University uses to determine enrollment, but we would’ve very much liked to look at pay increase per pupil if that hadn’t been the case.
7) One of the most interesting facts found in the salary database is one we can’t report on: The change from average 2011 salary to average July 1, 2013 salary, to average salary-with-merit-increase. Some departments actually made more on average back in 2011 than they do now, even with the pay hike.
8) It ain’t easy being a librarian. Their average salary and increase per employee was quite low, compared to other departments.
9) The average salary for Faculty & Student Services is less than half the average salary over in the Business school.
10) We still can’t get over Dean A. Provost. Best name ever.