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.
Budgeted salary of full-time faculty at Wichita State, the University of Kansas and the three University of Nebraska campuses, by rank. Department chairs are included at their rank and deans are left out on every side. Pick a field for a like-for-like comparison; the whole-university view mixes very different fields.
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† fewer than 10 people: read as individuals, not a trend. “Peers pooled” weights each peer by its number of people at that rank. Kansas has only FY2026–27 and none of the Kansas or Nebraska files has an FTE field, so part-time appointments are counted at the salary shown; Wichita State is full-time (1.0 FTE) lines only. Nebraska is total salary, including chair and endowed stipends. Kansas State, Oklahoma and Colorado State do not publish faculty salaries by person, so they appear in the spending comparison above but not here.
Wichita State’s Barton School against Nebraska–Omaha in detail →
Faculty who are in the data in every comparison year, on the same track throughout, never a chair or dean, so the lines follow one fixed group at each university and composition cannot move them. Wichita State is the full-time budgeted salary; Nebraska is the base rank salary, so chair and endowed stipends never count as raises. FY26 is left out everywhere because the Nebraska FY26 file is not in the data; Kansas publishes only FY2026–27 and cannot be followed. “Same rank only” removes everyone promoted in the window (tenure-track only: within non-tenure-track the files do not mark promotions consistently).
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† fewer than 10 people. “In the data FY21” counts the faculty each university started with; the gap to “same people every year” is turnover and role changes, not sampling. “Per year” is the compound annual rate over the six years. People who changed track, held a chair or a dean-type role, or missed any year are left out on every side, so the pools follow one rule. A person belongs to the field of their FY21 college (Wichita State) or FY21 department (Nebraska); the field department lists are the same as in the pay-by-rank section above. UNO and UNK have no engineering faculty in the data.
How many people each university budgets — senior administration (president or chancellor, provost, the vice, associate and assistant versions, general counsel and chief officers; deans, directors and support posts are not counted), staff paid $100K or more (a fixed nominal line), tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty (deans excluded, chairs included), and all staff — and what each group costs in total. One rule on every side. Nebraska’s system-wide executives (its president, system vice presidents, general counsel) sit in a separate central administration and are not in these campus figures; Wichita State has no such separate layer, so its count carries functions Nebraska keeps centrally — the dashed line, Wichita State without NIAR and the Division of Research, removes its research arms. KU publishes no staff data.
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Combined pay is the sum of the group’s budgeted salaries that year, so it moves with both headcount and raises, and the group is whoever holds such a position each year, not a fixed set of people. A person’s budget lines are summed before the $100K test. Athletics positions are never counted as senior administration.
every figure on this page comes from these official publications
Unofficial, independent and not guaranteed accurate — do your own assessment. This site is a personal, independent compilation of publicly published budget books, budgeted-employee reports and state payroll records. It is not affiliated with, reviewed by or endorsed by Wichita State University or any other university, and nothing here is an official figure or statement. The numbers were extracted by software and the answers are generated by an AI assistant; both can contain errors (mis-read lines, mis-matched names, mis-classified titles, mistaken interpretation), and salary figures are budgeted or payroll amounts, not what any person ultimately earned. Nothing on this site is advice, and it must not be used for any employment, compensation, evaluation or other decision. Treat everything as a starting point: ask the data box your own questions, plot what you want to see, and verify against the official documents listed under Data sources at the top of the page.
What data this site holds. Wichita State budgets and budgeted employees for FY2019–FY2027, set against the published budgets of Kansas State, Oklahoma, Nebraska–Omaha and Colorado State. Budgeted salaries by name, rank and department for every faculty member at Wichita State, the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska campuses (UNL, UNO, UNK), and for the non-faculty staff named in the Wichita State budget books. Actual income (calendar-year total pay received, from state payroll records via KansasOpenGov) for every employee at the three Kansas universities, Wichita State, Kansas and Kansas State, for 2021–2025. Questions in the Ask box are answered only from this data.
How the figures were computed. Every number on this site was extracted from the source documents and calculated by deterministic, re-runnable scripts — the same inputs always give the same figures, and no number was typed by hand or produced by AI. AI is used only to phrase the Ask-the-data answers from those precomputed figures. Where a figure is an estimate (promotion increments from the budget books’ medians, hire-year vacancy budgets), the page says so where it appears.
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.