Dear ETSU faculty and staff:
Over the past three academic years, the ETSU Board of Trustees and leaders across the institution have been working to increase faculty and staff salaries with the goal of bringing ETSU employees’ wages in line with market rates and our institutional peers. In support of that goal, the university has provided historic across-the-board salary enhancements each year since Fall 2022.
Additionally, this year, as a result of the Budget Model Update, the university was able to prioritize and identify — and the ETSU Board of Trustees approved — more than $3.6 million in recurring funds to invest in strategic, targeted salary enhancements for those faculty and staff members whose pay remains below market rates.
We are pleased to share that we will begin distributing those funds to faculty members this month. Of the 639 regular faculty members (excluding those in the College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, and Family Medicine), Human Resources identified 388 who are below market targets. These targets are based on data from the 2024 College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) annual survey disaggregated by faculty rank and primary instructional CIP Code. The faculty CIP codes were determined via historical Human Resource records with input from deans and chairs and reviewed by Institutional Research.
Pay increases for these 388 faculty members will be reflected in their March paychecks. Any salary increases will be provided retroactively to November 1, 2024, or the date of hire, whichever is most recent. Details about this process are available on the Classification and Compensation Update Project webpage.
Faculty members who will receive increases will be notified via personal emails from Human Resources later this afternoon. University administrators worked closely with Deans and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee to develop a methodology for distributing funds. Details regarding the methodology are available on the project webpage.
Because staff roles vary to a greater extent than the roles of faculty members, we are still working to analyze market data and develop a method for providing staff salary increases with the goal of completing this process by the end of May. While we regret that staff members will have to wait a bit longer to see increases, we also must ensure we are thorough in our analysis. As with faculty, staff salary increases will be applied retroactively to November or the employees’ hire date, whichever is the more recent.
Please note that faculty and staff members in the College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, and Family Medicine are excluded from this distribution, as those entities have been given the flexibility to address market gaps on their own. Adjunct faculty members, temporary employees, and student workers also are not part of this process.
The university does not have the resources to fully close market gaps in a single year. However, this initial investment reflects significant progress toward our longer-term goal of bringing all salaries and wages up to market. We will work to identify resources to provide additional investments in employee compensation in the coming years, as long as the university’s financial position and enrollments remain strong.
We would like to thank leaders across the institution for working collaboratively and diligently to make this investment in our people possible. We also would like to thank each of you for all you do to make ETSU a place where people come first.
If you would like more information about salary enhancements and the overarching Classification and Compensation Update Project, we encourage you to visit the project webpage, which contains a list of FAQs, details on funding distribution methods, and the project’s background and timeline.
Sincerely,
Brian Noland, President
Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
East Tennessee State University was founded in 1911 with a singular mission: to improve the quality of life for people in the region and beyond. Through its world-class health sciences programs and interprofessional approach to health care education, ETSU is a highly respected leader in rural health research and practices. The university also boasts nationally ranked programs in the arts, technology, computing, and media studies. ETSU serves approximately 14,000 students each year and is ranked among the top 10 percent of colleges in the nation for students graduating with the least amount of debt.
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