Employees’ salaries are one of the main components of the University’s budget. The salaries we requested this year add up to more than $1.5 billion. With the University’s ongoing process of reviewing its spending and making decisions in this budget crisis, there has never been such an important time for transparency.

In publishing this guide, The Daily Illini aims to continue the transparency the administration has begun.

We feel it is the right of Illinois taxpayers and the University’s tuition-paying students to see how their money is being spent at the on University, including on salaries.

The figures listed in this guide and in our database do not include all compensation, such as overtime, benefits and other pay means. The database does, however, list part-time and full-time employees. It goes without saying that many factors affect how much each employee is paid, including experience, education, specialized training and skill level. Regardless, our philosophy is that more information is better than less information, and that the more access readers have to this information, the better job the University will do in using that money wisely.

To provide readers with the most up-to-date information, we’re presenting “Grey Book” data, which is provided by the University with information on academic, salaried appointments.

This means the data for University of Illinois employees is current as of last September, when the Board of Trustees approved the salaries for all University employees. The salaries that we’re publishing are based on the annual appointments that will carry through the forthcoming year, which ensures that our database includes the administrative appointments that didn’t take effect until the beginning of this year. For nonacademic, civil service wages, the University provided us with their average salaries based on hourly wages for 52 40-hour weeks a year.

We occasionally get this question: “My salary is personal. Why is it being published?”

Like many other things published by The Daily Illini, state employees’ salaries are public record. Salary Guide does not include personal information such as addresses, phone numbers or social security numbers.

Anyone can file an Illinois Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the information we’ve printed here. And for all academic positions, anyone can download the University’s Grey Book as a PDF or view it online at uillinois.edu, but we don’t expect that to be nearly as accessible as the information we’re presenting.

This year, the print edition focuses on the context of top administrator’s pay compared with their peers and provides an in- depth look at the budget for the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics. In addition, it examines how much the University is spending on emeriti professors.

Online, in our full database of employees’ pay from all three campuses, you can see how much more an employee is making than the rest of his or her campus, or how his or her salary compares with the department’s median pay.

To access the full list, visit SalaryGuide.DailyIllini.com.