While University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank continues to be a vocal advocate for employee raises in order to keep the campus competitive, university records show the majority of the pay raises in the last fiscal year went to administrators.

An open records request from WisPolitics.com found $346,163 of the approximately $1.9 million in pay raises given to UW employees in fiscal year 2012-2113 went to administrators. These high-ranking employees also accounted for the largest share of the pay increases, as $248,756 went to 19 employees.

Salary adjustments were made in response to competing outside offers for individuals as well as in response to how salaries fell in comparison to peer institutes, Vince Sweeney, UW spokesperson, said.

Sweeney said UW has “good people in place now” and, due to the nature of the competitive marketplace, the university must do what it can with limited funds to prevent them from leaving. Salary adjustments are a way of investing in the people at UW that make significant contributions, he said.

The amount of a pay raise depends on where the faculty sits among their peers and how much money is available, he said.

“Each and every case is different, ” Sweeney said. “There is no cookie cutter approach.”

The marketplace is also a great determinant in which salaries are adjusted and by how much, Sweeney said.

Regarding retention, Sweeney said it is important UW does everything it can to keep people who will advance this institution. When people leave, they take institutional knowledge with them ,which is hard to replace, he said.

“Every department wants to be the best, and the secret behind success is the people,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney said he was not familiar with any specific cases of people leaving even after receiving raises, but he admitted that giving someone a raise is not always 100 percent successful.

Mike Mikalsen, spokesperson for Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, said Nass is “not pleased” a large percentage of available funds to retain quality employees across the UW System “ended up going to administrators.”

There is a constant emphasis on the needs and wants of the administrators, which ignores the situation of faculty and staff, Mikalsen said. Nass understands the need to keep good administrators, but UW also needs to “start from the bottom up, it should not be from the top down,” he said.

Mikalsen said the priority on retention should focus on faculty. Educators are often the last to receive pay increases, which is a problem, he said.

He also said there is “no doubt” administrator funding could have been better spent.

“[UW] could have, with what was given to just a couple of the administrators, provided 2 to 3 percent pay increases to 15 to 19 faculty, faculty in the classroom, faculty that are important to the primary mission of the university system and that wasn’t done,” he said.