Faculty Retention Fund
FY 2023-2024
Program Description
The Office of the Provost will continue its efforts to retain faculty through appropriate and competitive salary compensation. For FY 2023-24, limited funding is available to help support pre-emptive offers and counter-offers to retain Purdue’s most valued, high performing and potentially at-risk faculty members. Funds may be requested for pre-emptive salary enhancements or counter-offers.
Deans are encouraged to make efforts to retain high risk/high performing faculty in any department. These could be faculty who are in the top 10 to 20% of their department, those playing a vital institutional role, or others who Deans judge are not being adequately compensated for their role. The focus continues to be on identifying retention risks and issues before the faculty member is moved to seek outside offers or opportunities. This program specifically addresses compensation. Deans and heads should address any other factors that may contribute to the retention of faculty.
Pre-emptive Offers
As part of this effort, department heads are encouraged to identify, and recommend to their deans, faculty who are critical to their unit’s strategic areas and who are highly accomplished, broadly recognized and potentially at risk of being recruited by other competitive institutions. These faculty members should be targeted as retention priorities, and requests can be made that can help preempt their interest in other institutions, however, the expectation would be for the colleges to target and fund these priorities internally. The intent is for units to develop a practice of identifying and investing in highly valued faculty members before they seek or receive other offers.
Counter-offers
Even as we work toward a system that will more effectively recognize key faculty members and preempt their interests in going elsewhere, there will be a need to address immediate retention cases. Similar to the Pre-emptive offers, funding may be requested to help provide salary increases to meet counter offers from competitive institutions attempting to recruit our highly talented faculty, but the expectation is for the colleges, when possible, to fund these priorities internally, before reaching out to the Provost Office. Typically, requests for the same faculty member should not be made more than once every three years. We encourage you to think long-term about how best to retain highly-valued faculty.
Financial Resources
Requests for assistance will be considered and approved on a case-by-case basis with the Provost providing up to one-third of the cost of retention salary increase request and the unit(s) providing the other two-thirds. Note that in the event the retention increase includes the annual merit increase, the annual merit increase should be deducted prior to calculating the Provost’s one-third match for the retention increase. The merit component can be determined using the average merit increase percent established by the University’s merit salary policy effective July 1 and should be budgeted separately, with the balance of the increase budgeted as retention.
Increases allocated in FY 23-24 for faculty who leave the university in either FY 23-24 or FY 24-25 must be returned to the Provost Faculty Retention Fund in the amounts provided by the Provost. Units are responsible for notifying the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs of these events.
Review and Approval Process
Supporting evidence should be included with each request, i.e. comparative peer salary data, evidence of high achievement and, when the request is a counter-offer, the institution(s) making the offer.
Please direct requests to the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Office of the Provost at the following email address: approvalsofficeoftheprovost@purdue.edu . The email Subject line should read “Faculty Retention.” Requests can be submitted as needed throughout the year.
Assessment
An annual audit will be performed to determine the impact of these increases on the retention of faculty over the five years following the retention increase.
Issued August 2023