Built to support shared governance: informed faculty, staff and students are better partners in deciding how a public university spends its money. This page puts the budget numbers, faculty pay and peer comparisons in one place, in plain language, for everyone to examine.
Do your own assessment and exploration. Nothing here is a conclusion you have to take on trust: ask the data box any question, click through the follow-ups, plot what you want to see, and compare the answers with the official documents. Every source used on this page is linked at the bottom under Check the sources yourself.
Ask about a faculty salary, a department or college average (tenure-track vs. non-tenure-track), a budget line, a trend over the years, or a comparison between universities. Answers come only from the source documents. Say "chart" or "plot" to see the numbers visualized, or click a suggested follow-up.
Unofficial. This site and its AI answers are an independent compilation of publicly published documents, not official reports of any university. They may contain extraction or interpretation errors and must not be used for any assessment, evaluation, or decision-making — for official figures, consult each university's published budget documents and conduct your own independent assessment.
An AI-assisted look at where public universities spend their money and what they pay their faculty. Ask any question below — a salary, a department average, a budget line, a trend, or a comparison — and it is answered from the universities' own published budget books, budgeted-employee reports, and state payroll data: Wichita State (FY2019–FY2027), Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska (UNL, UNO, UNK), and Oklahoma.
Individual faculty salaries: budgeted salary by name, rank and department is available for every faculty member at Wichita State, the University of Kansas, and the University of Nebraska campuses (UNL, UNO, UNK). Actual income (total pay actually received, from the State of Kansas payroll) is available for every employee at the three Kansas universities — WSU, KU and Kansas State — for 2021–2025.
Each school publishes a core-budget line for what it spends on teaching faculty. Since FY24, WSU's Instruction line (all funds, including restricted) has fallen 2.5% to $96.6M and lost 3.0 points of budget share. Over the same years Kansas State is up 18.2% to $255.2M, the University of Oklahoma's budgeted faculty salaries are up 13.0% to $229.6M, Nebraska–Omaha's Instruction line is up 7.4% to $146.0M, and Colorado State's is up 7.3% to $342.0M.
Nebraska–Omaha budgets 51% more for Instruction than WSU — $146.0M against $96.6M in FY27 — for a student body of the same size: about 15,000 students each (UNO 14,954 in Fall 2025; WSU 14,342 degree-seeking, 18,458 total main-campus headcount).
Degree-seeking enrollment (undergraduate + graduate headcount) is essentially unchanged since Fall 2023. Over the same span, both revenue sources that fund General Use spending grew — tuition income is up 7.8% and the General Operating allocation is up 6.7%. More money came in per student, while the share of it reaching Instruction went down.
Charts below run FY23–FY26 to line up with the enrollment data — the Fall 2026 census isn't available yet, so FY27 revenue has no matching enrollment figure.
Degree-seeking headcount, WSU Fall Census
Tuition revenue (General Fees Fund)
State General Fund, general operating allocation
Money spent on Instruction (faculty and instructional staff salaries) has gone down every year since FY24 — in raw dollars and as a share of the budget, no matter how you count the funds. Meanwhile the President's Office (the president's and provost's executive offices) more than doubled its spending, and Institutional Support (central administration — finance, HR, general administration, public relations) grew about a fifth. Finance & Administration (business operations and administrative support) also grew sharply once grants and other outside funding are counted. Academic Support (libraries, computing services, and college Dean's/advising offices) was the only category that didn't move in a clear direction — up in outside funding, down everywhere else.
27.5% of GUF budget (was 34.0% in FY23)
FY23 $93.23M → FY27 $96.61M
13.7% of GUF budget (was 14.3% in FY23)
FY23 $33.75M → FY27 $39.85M
12.2% of GUF budget (was 10.8% in FY23)
FY23 $24.88M → FY27 $31.85M
42.5% of GUF budget (was 50.6% in FY23)
FY23 $165.67M → FY27 $173.51M
36.0% of GUF budget (was 31.1% in FY23)
FY23 $84.34M → FY27 $129.33M
6.6% of GUF budget (was 3.8% in FY23)
FY23 $8.93M → FY27 $20.26M
Kansas actual-pay figures come from the State of Kansas public employee payroll (KanView) data.
This page is an independent analysis of publicly available Wichita State University budget documents. It is not an official publication, statement, or position of Wichita State University, the Kansas Board of Regents, or any of their offices, and has not been reviewed or endorsed by them.
Figures were extracted programmatically from the university's published PDF budget books and enrollment factbook. While every figure was cross-checked against the source documents during preparation, extraction and categorization errors are possible — readers relying on these numbers for decisions should verify against the original source documents linked in this page's footer. Category labels ("Instruction," "Academic Support," "Institutional Support," etc.) and their plain-language descriptions reflect WSU's own budget-program definitions; the "faculty salary proxy" language used for Instruction is this author's characterization, not an official designation, since the Instruction program also includes some non-salary instructional costs.
Headlines, framing, and commentary throughout this page reflect this author's interpretation of the underlying public data and are offered for informational and discussion purposes only. They are not statements of fact about any individual's or office's conduct, are not intended to imply wrongdoing, and should not be relied upon as financial, legal, or official institutional guidance.