Higher education is ruled by supply and demand like the marketplace.
Salaries at the University are determined by what other schools are paying and how difficult it is to find a faculty member or potential dean for a given area of academia, not by a University program’s enrollment numbers.
Tommy Smith, associate vice chancellor of finance and administrative services and vice provost for finance of the Office of Budget and Planning, said when the University determines the salaries of new faculty members or deans, it looks at what other peer institutions are paying for those positions.
Christopher D’Elia, dean of the School of the Coast and Environment, earns an annual salary of $218,100, nearly $20,000 more than Gary Byerly, dean of the Graduate School. However, there are 69 students enrolled in the School of the Coast and Environment, and more than 4,000 enrolled in the Graduate School.
The College of Engineering has nearly twice the amount of students as the E.J. Ourso College of Business, but the colleges’ deans, Richard White and Richard Koubek, earn salaries differing by a few hundred dollars.
“It’s not simply just driven by the enrollment you have,” Smith said. “You have more teachers than you do have chemical engineers. Someone who [teaches] engineers will get paid more than someone in the liberal arts, it’s the same way that it happens in the private sector.”
Smith said this is because there’s scarcity in the realm of higher education, or a limited supply of people qualified do certain jobs at the University.
“If someone is very qualified and highly sought after, we might pay them more than average,” Smith said. “But whenever you hire somebody, you want to hire them at the market level.”
All of the salaries paid to University faculty members are factored into the annual budget, which is funded by both the state and money the University generates through tuition and fees.
Smith said over the last several years, the state has cut the percentage of the University’s annual budget, changing the ratio between state funding and University-generated funding.
For about five years, the University could not afford to provide salary raises given the budget cuts, causing many faculty member’s salaries to fall below the market level.
However, in the last two years, the University has provided merit-based raises averaging 4 and 3 percent, which were “eeked” together using spare funds, said LSU President F. King Alexander.
Merit-based raises are determined by a number of factors, but they are decided for individual faculty members on the department level.
“As the institution, we’ll come up with some criteria, such as you have to be here for 6 months, you have to be full time,” Smith said. “So we’ll look at it as an institution and say, ‘How much is this going to cost us for a 1 percent, 2 percent raise and on up?’”
Smith said after determining how much of a raise can be given, a list of faculty members who meet the criteria is given to each college and school, along with an allotment of money for raises. The head of the college will then distribute it to the department level, where raises are decided based on evaluations.
“So, if you give someone a 5 percent increase, you have to give someone else a three. There might be people that get zero and others that get 8 or 9 percent increases,” Smith said. “It’s supposed to be based on their evaluations, and Human Resource Management reviews all of it.”
Faculty salaries can fluctuate over time as people change positions. Smith said it can be hard to understand how salaries have changed for individuals.
“So, we have a huge, complex organization,” Smith said. “You have people going between 12 months’ and nine months’ salary, people going from part time to full time, and there’s a number of different explanations up and down. And it happens every day.”

Check out our LSU Salary Database below our story to learn what faculty and staff make at the university.