Rock Island Today

Brandi McGuire, a Republican running for the 72nd District State House seat, recently responded to the state’s current woes with her own perspective on university professors’ pay, asking whether their compensation is fair.

Illinois’ state universities rely heavily on Springfield for funding, and the past school year has been fraught with funding delays, forced layoffs and even canceled classes. However, McGuire said the real financial strain crippling Illinois' public universities is funding pensions and professors’ salaries.

"The existing crisis with state university pensions mirrors the state's current unbalanced budget problems and spending more than current revenue provides,” McGuire said. “Decades of overspending and lack of structural reforms to the state pension system, like the state budget, will lead to an eventual collapse of the retirement system, and universities … students, taxpayers and retirees will suffer the consequences.”

A 2014 Illinois Department of Insurance analysis of higher-education funding revealed that all of the money public universities obtain from the state essentially goes toward funding university retiree pensions. The report said $6.9 billion in tax-based funding has subsidized university pensions over the past decade, with $1.51 billion spent in 2014 alone.

Since state universities received $1.24 billion in general state aid that year, the pension subsidy shortfall of $270 million was covered by students through their tuition. The state’s contributions to the State University Retirement System (SURS), on behalf of the state’s 69,436 university employees in 2014, was $21,644 per employee -- five times higher than the $4,077 university employees contributed to their own pensions.

Despite exorbitant state contributions toward university employee pensions, as of June 30, 2014, SURS had a $20.04 billion deficit – a 186 percent growth rate over the past decade due to an increase in the number of retirees, state auditors said.

Back in 2005, 39,800 university retirees were receiving benefits from SURS. By 2014, that number had grown to 59,406, with 1,443 retirees collecting over $100,000 in pension benefits and 55 collecting more than $200,000, the Better Government Association said.

Not only are university employees well taken care of upon retirement, but professors in Chicago earn more than the national average. The Glassdoor website said Chicago professors take home $120,167 annually on average, compared with the $114,134 national professor salary average.

“The fact that 16 percent of Illinois pensioners receive a pension of over $100,000 while the national average is under $17,000 is an example of Illinois' unbalanced retirement system," McGuire said.