In Northern Illinois University’s budget, personnel costs account for 55.77% of the funds. 

The salaries of NIU’s employees have increased by 4% to 9% each year, according to John Acardo, senior associate vice president and chief human resource officer.

“So over the past, I’d say five years, past five fiscal years, the university has prioritized base salaries, and we’ve seen increases in personnel expenses between 4% and 9% year over year,” Acardo said. “But we have prioritized employees based salaries, both in contractual negotiations and in the non represented group.”

This change in salary amount is due to an increase in labor costs over time. To determine the pay scale the university should use, NIU utilizes a tool called Payfactors. This tool compares the salaries of similar positions in higher education to determine what the salary range should be.

“They (Payfactors) have tools that businesses can use, which we do for pay scale, Payfactors that take over 5,000 global organizations and over 30,000 positions, and we inject our own market data, so we subscribe to other salary surveys in higher education and inject that into the program to then compare job descriptions to job descriptions, which then inform us what those ranges are,” Acardo said.

When the university reconsiders their salary amounts, they make sure to assess market competitiveness to decide on a salary they think is fair.

“I think it’s important to know that we continue to assess our salaries for market competitiveness,” Acardo said. “On the whole, we do have salaries for our employment groups that are at or above market, and we continue to assess those on a regular and frequent basis.”

In addition to base salaries, some NIU employees also receive pay in the form of “additional compensation.”

“Additional compensation is, I think the title implies, it’s just that it’s extra pay for additional things. And so we have contractually obligated additional assignments for faculty that are included in that. So you take on an overload that’s considered additional compensation, because it’s above and beyond what we’ve contracted you to do,” Acardo said. “Same with staff. They have extra duties or assignments that may not fall into the purview or scope of what their job is, and so it’s an added assignment, and so they get compensated for those things.”

The Division of Human Resource Services provides information on NIU’s website on their comparative analysis for compensation. The tools they use align job descriptions, not titles, in their database to compare salaries to those in their peer group.

NIU salaries will continue to be reevaluated each year and change as the university deems fit. 

The Northern Star’s full Salary Issue including salaries of all full-time employees can be found online and in print around NIU’s campus.