In a move to bring the salaries of UC chancellors closer in alignment to their industry peers, the UC Board of Regents last week approved a pay raise for nine of the 10 campus chancellors, including UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang, who will receive a more than $128,000 salary increase by March of the 2022-23 academic year.

“The caliber of UC personnel — its faculty, staff, and administrative leaders — is responsible for the high quality of UC’s myriad contributions to the public, throughout California, across the nation and around the world,” a staff report for the Jan. 19 meeting stated. “Compensating personnel fairly at all levels is essential to maintaining the excellence of UC’s workforce, and to meeting the commitments to those the university serves.”

With the salary increases, Yang will make $579,750 annually by March 2023, an increase of 28.4% from his current salary of $451,362.

In the Regents’ policy on compensation for chancellors, the president is to recommend an adjustment to bring the chancellor’s compensation to a level that is more competitive with the average compensation at peer institutes when a UC chancellor’s pay falls below the market for other university leaders, according to the report. 

Nine of the 10 UC Chancellors have base salaries below the 50th percentile of the market for their positions, and of those nine, six have base salaries that are below the 25th percentile, according to the report.

Using salaries of public and private universities in the Association of American Universities, the median compensation of UC chancellors lags behind that of leaders at other AAU institutions by 49%, falling in the bottom third “despite the size, complexity and stature” of UC campuses, the report stated.

Of 65 public and private campuses used for comparison, Yang’s annual salary ranks 62nd at $451,362, landing above only the chancellors at UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced. The staff report notes that UC Merced and UC Riverside are not part of the AAU, but were used as a comparison among the chancellors addressed.

The median chancellor salaries for UC chancellors ($505,598) are below that of AAU private schools ($1.4 million), AAU public schools ($808,980) and all AAU universities combined ($982,989), according to the report.

The adjustments to the nine chancellors’ salaries do not exceed the 60th percentile of salaries reported by public AAU universities, and would total up to $800,423, according to the report.

The UC Regents’ Government Committee initially discussed the pay increase proposal with a plan to incrementally increase the chancellors’ salaries over three phases in 16 months, but ultimately voted to take the jump all at once and have the increases go into effect on March 1 of this year.

“To me, this was an issue on pay equity. We have an obligation to pay our people well and we should pay our chancellors well,” Regent Jonathan Sures said. “We are lucky enough to have probably the most diverse group of chancellors of any public university system. It’s something I’m proud of, we should be proud of, but we need to pay them fairly, and I think this is the first step in doing that.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Jade Martinez-Pogue can be reached at jmartinez-pogue@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.