Movers and losers: some Purdue 2020 salary book analysis

It's within the first three months of the year! That means the new salary data has been released!!!! And this time, I've graduted! So that means I have to write my own analysis piece now instead of waiting for the campus desk at The Exponent to do it for me.

For those unaware, salaries for employees at a public institution are public record and can be found in many places. I publish them at my website salary.ryanjchen.com, and Purdue's student newspaper _The Exponent_ usually publishes them too in paper format.

Since I'm kind of in a rush and want to go for a bike ride, here are a few notes on what I've found.

Mitch Daniels

After a year flipped upside down by the advent of the coronavirus, Purdue's president had his compensation raised by $20,000.51 (+2.19%) to set his earnings at $933,591.90. Though a lot lower than his previous raise from 2018 to 2019 of almost $70,000, both compensation increases pale in comparison to those of years' past, when his salary jumped almost $200,000 from 2016 to 2017.

Matt Painter

Following a rough 16-15 season while trying to deal with the loss of key players on the team and the coronavirus, Purdue Men's Basketball Head Coach Matt Painter's compensation dropped by $1,062,766.63 (-31.95%) to $2,263,453.54. The million-dollar drop was the largest at Purdue. Things are looking up this year though, with the current Purdue squad reaching the AP Top 25 on Monday morning with a 12-6 overall record.

As CBS college basketball reporter Jon Rothstein often tweets]: "Death. Taxes. Matt Painter."

For those curious, Indiana state income tax is 3.23%, Tippecanoe County income tax is 1.1% and federal income tax for (very) high earners is:

amount_owed = 156,235 + 0.37 * (income - 518,400)

That brings us to about $824,930 (assuming filing as married, I just left all the other defaults on this website).

To replicate this finding using the SQLite file found here, run the following SQL query.

select Year2020.firstName,
    Year2019.lastName,
    Year2020.department,
    Year2020.compensation - Year2019.compensation as movement,
    (Year2020.compensation - Year2019.compensation)/Year2019.compensation as increase
from Year2020
    join Year2019 on Year2020.lastName = Year2019.lastName
    and Year2020.firstName = Year2019.firstName
    and Year2020.middleName = Year2019.middleName
order by movement asc
limit 10;

Top five salary gains

Congratulations to the following people for their raises! This list excludes new hires and can be run with the SQL query listed below using the SQLite file found [here]().

Note that some of this data could be due to being a new hire in the latter half of 2020 and only fully getting their salary this year. Case in point: Mr. Nadelson over there joined in December.

select Year2020.firstName,
    Year2019.lastName,
    Year2020.department,
    Year2020.compensation - Year2019.compensation as movement,
    (Year2020.compensation - Year2019.compensation)/Year2019.compensation as increase
from Year2020
    join Year2019 on Year2020.lastName = Year2019.lastName
    and Year2020.firstName = Year2019.firstName
    and Year2020.middleName = Year2019.middleName
order by movement desc
limit 10;

Big hiring areas

Some big gains in building services and operations, in a year where these categories can more or less be deemed the most dangerous roles with respect to coronavirus. The mechanical engineering department numbers at Purdue main campus continues to hurtle towards the moon, with no telling if they will stop there. Fun fact! If you took the entire 2020 compensation of the mechanical engineering faculty, and assuming it takes $1/inch to get to the moon and back, they could make the round-trip close to five times.

This list can be reproduced with the SQL query listed below using the SQLite file found here.

select count2020 - count2019 as movement,
    d2020
from (
        select count(Year2020.compensation) as count2020,
            Year2020.department as d2020
        from Year2020
        group by Year2020.department
    )
    join (
        select count(Year2019.compensation) as count2019,
            Year2019.department as d2019
        from Year2019
        group by Year2019.department
    ) on d2020 = d2019
order by movement desc
limit 10;

Other notes

PUPD: pumping the brakes on temps

Purdue's police department, led by PUPD chief John Cox, had 68 less members on payroll than last year. The loss, caused entirely by the 73 less temp hires and brought back up by a few hires on the support, service and police hourly employee groups.

P.S.: If you have any questions or want to roast my horrible SQL skills, you can email me at [email protected]. If you want to help contribute, check out the codebase on Github.