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 and arrive as a table and chart whenever the numbers call for one — or click a suggested follow-up.
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.
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 site is a personal, independent compilation and analysis of publicly available documents: the annual operating budget books and budgeted-employee reports published by Wichita State University, the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska system and the University of Oklahoma, enrollment factbooks, and the State of Kansas payroll records published through KansasOpenGov. It is not an official publication, statement, or position of any of those universities, the Kansas Board of Regents, the State of Kansas, or any of their offices, and has not been reviewed or endorsed by them. The author is a faculty member acting in a personal capacity.
Figures were extracted programmatically from PDF and spreadsheet documents, linked across years and across sources by name, and summarized by software. The "Ask the data" answers and the "why this salary changed" explanations are generated by an AI assistant from that data. While figures were cross-checked against the source documents during preparation, extraction, name-matching, title-classification, department-merging and AI-interpretation errors are possible, and some figures (hire-year vacancy budgets, split budget lines, merged department names) are the author's reconstructions, explained where they appear. Budgeted salaries are what a budget book funded a position at, and payroll figures are calendar-year totals as published by the state; neither is a statement of what any individual ultimately earned, and none of it is advice. Nothing on this site should be used for any employment, compensation, evaluation, hiring or other decision about any person — readers should verify against the original source documents linked in this page's footer. Everything is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, and the author accepts no liability for errors or for any use made of it. Names appear only as they are printed in those public records; anyone who believes a figure about them is wrong is invited to point to the source line and it will be corrected. 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.