Message from the Chancellor:
I am pleased to report the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees approved the UTHSC budget at their meeting this past Friday, June 21.
As I articulated in our recent Town Hall, “It is a good, but challenging budget year.”
Key points:
- Tuition was held to increases of only $200 per student for graduate degrees. Those funds will go to support library infrastructure improvements and acquisitions. No tuition increase for undergraduate students.
- The new budget allows a 2 percent salary and benefit pool for employees to be distributed through a combination of equity, merit, and cost of living pay raises. The budget also increases the minimum wage for full-time UTHSC employees to $15 dollars per hour. This wage increase for our lowest paid employees is made possible by a multi-year plan (crafted by Executive Vice Chancellor Brown and Sr. Vice Chancellor Ferrara) of providing a minimum dollar increase in compensation for all full-time employees.
- Most employees will see either a 2% increase in base state compensation or $1000 dollars increase whichever is larger. This should be reflected in the August paycheck retroactive to July 1.
- In addition, funding for Phase 2 of the build out of the Audiology Speech Pathology space in the UT Conference Center in Knoxville was the number one item on the UT capital budget request for next year. Build out funds for the top floor of the new Nash Research building and renovation of the UTHSC police building was also on the UT capital request list. Revenue for security upgrade projects and capital maintenance was also included in this year’s budget.
I would also like to call your attention to the recent finance and budget Town Hall which focused on the compensation and salary comparison report that demonstrated we continue to pay competitive compensation relative to our peers for faculty and staff.
We have gotten where we have gotten because of you. There is much left to accomplish, but we have made significant progress.
Thank you for what you do every day.
Steve J. Schwab, MD
Chancellor
To view the Town Hall meeting, please visit:
https://mediaserver.uthsc.edu/uthscms/Play/841c234e83de4f0ea4706cb522986ecd1d.