For many of the 40,000 students that attend the University every year, the four-year college plan is fairly rigid: get in, then get out.

But that philosophy doesn’t bode well for a cash-strapped school trying to entice students to stay in the state — or one that needs to lure top-notch faculty onto its campus and keep them there to ensure its success.

The “brain drain,” as University President Michael Hogan described it in a recent interview with The Daily Illini Editorial Board, is more than just a one-dimensional issue.

“We’ve lost a lot of faculty on this campus,” Hogan said. “But I think it’s too soon to panic. Other universities are having many of the same problems.”

While schools across the country may be experiencing financial difficulties, the state of Illinois still owes about $174 million to the University as of Oct. 31 — and a 2010 Illinois Board of Higher Education report listed Urbana-Champaign as one of the least competitive among its peers in terms of salary. In a separate December 2010 report, the average salary of an employee at the University — among professors, associate and assistant professors, faculty and lecturers — was listed as $100,100.

Confounding the problem are concerns over a new provision added to the state’s pension code, instituted Jan. 1.

“I’m very, very worried about the pension issue because the state covers our pension cost for the University now and our health care cost,” Hogan said. “If the state says you’re going to have to pick up more of that tab … well, that would be devastating, for one thing.”

As a result of the new provision, staff that came in after Jan. 1 must wait until the age of 67 before they receive full benefits, along with a cut in pension compensation. Hogan estimated that 20 percent of the University’s faculty would be able to walk out with full pension benefits right now.

“I’m not saying that all 20 percent would go. But that’s 20 percent 55 and older who could walk out with full pension benefits under the old pension system,” he said. “And then what would we have to do? We’d have to go rehire them. They’d have to be rehired retirees, so they’d get their full pension plus paycheck while we slowly went about rebuilding the faculty. That’s crazy.”

Pension reform isn’t the only measure taken to trim the deficit.

One recent one the University itself has taken aimed at curbing the budget crisis — the institution of two voluntary separation or retirement programs in 2010 — has not had an extremely negative effect on faculty retention, said Richard Wheeler, interim vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost.

“The idea was not to get rid of people who weren’t good, but to offer people on the faculty who had been on the job long enough for them to think seriously about retirement, an opportunity to take retirement a little earlier than they would have otherwise,” he said. “The fear, of course, was that we would lose really good people who were still in the prime of their careers, and they would go off somewhere else. But we didn’t think that would be the main outcome.”

The Voluntary Retirement Program, or VRP, allowed faculty and other academic staff who met State University Retirement System (SURS) requirements the ability to leave early and receive a lump-sum payment of 50 percent of their salary at the time of retirement. Over 130 faculty took the option when it was offered in spring 2010.

Former Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite, now the director of the University at British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, was one professor who saw the VRP as a viable option. For her, being able to take the buyout was more of a coincidence and good timing rather than an incentive to move.

“I thought, at the time, the buyout would help me set up going where I am now. It was not in any way an amount that was useful,” she said. “It was pretty much a career decision … I thought this was a place I could move to settle and move into retirement.”

Haythornthwaite said she was invested in moving up in administration, but did not have that opportunity at the University.

Aside from economics, Hogan cites location as another concern for retention.

“Sometimes you just can’t do anything about it,” he said. “They’ve got a husband or wife on opposite coasts and they want to be together somewhere. Or you’ve got someone who grew up by the mountains or shoreline and just wants to be there and an offer comes along. No matter what you do, you can’t give them an ocean.”

But Kristin Hoganson, a professor in History who has been on campus for 12 years, vouches for living in the Champaign-Urbana area.

“The town has a bad rap, and I understand why,” she said. “There aren’t any mountains or beautiful lakes or beach fronts or anything like that. But it’s a very livable town — the parks, the local libraries, the cost of living.”

For Hogan, it’s an issue that could be solved in coming years, especially with the development of a high-speed rail system that could connect Champaign to the Chicagoland area.

“If we could do that, it would be transformative for the University, really, for our faculty and for our students,” he said. “But in the meantime, we have to find other ways of building these kinds of bridges.”