Built to support shared governance: informed faculty are better partners in deciding how a public university spends its students' tuition and taxpayers' 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.
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.
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.
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 (calendar-year total pay actually received, from state payroll records via KansasOpenGov) is available for every employee at the three Kansas universities — WSU, KU and Kansas State — for 2021–2025.
Click any university above for a detailed, category-by-category comparison with WSU.
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.
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. Academic Affairs (Instruction's parent division, covering all six colleges) fell the same way, absorbing a $5.1M General Use budget cut in FY27 alone — about two-thirds of every dollar reallocated away from any division that year — the same year WSU's Intercollegiate Athletics budget more than quadrupled, from $3.2M to $13.9M. 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.
Counting every budgeted faculty line in WSU's six academic colleges (Dean and department-chair roles tracked separately below, not as TT or NTT; endowed-chair professors and support staff counted by their faculty rank): filled tenure-track positions fell from 338 in FY22 to 284 in FY27 (−54, −16.0%), while non-tenure-track positions rose from 149 to 204 (+55, +36.9%).
The College of Engineering lost the most tenure-track faculty of any college — 61 down to 38 (−23 positions, −38%) — 43% of the entire university's FY22→FY27 TT decline (−23 of −54) concentrated in one college. See every college →
Average budgeted salary of every full-time (1.0 FTE) faculty line in WSU's six academic colleges, with Dean, Associate/Assistant Dean and department-chair roles excluded: tenure-track pay rose from $85.8K in FY22 to $95.2K in FY27 (+11.0%), while non-tenure-track pay rose from $61.6K to $73.0K (+18.5%). A tenure-track professor earned 39% more than a non-tenure-track colleague in FY22; by FY27 the premium is 30%.
FY27 is the first year in the series that the tenure-track average fell — $99.2K in FY26 to $95.2K (−4.0%). The 37 tenure-track faculty who left after FY26 averaged $99,151; the 20 hired for FY27 average $70,834. The premium ranges from 42% in the Barton School of Business to 21% in Health Professions. See every college →
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
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.