After four months of debate about more than a dozen proposals, the university Athletic Council will vote early next month on a proposed reallocation of football tickets after Ohio State switches to semesters in 2012.
The Finance and Facilities subcommittee of the council presented its recommendation April 6, but before the full Council votes to either accept or reject the subcommittee’s recommendation, other issues are quickly filling up the agenda.
In the next three days, The Lantern will explore some of the issues related to football ticket redistribution that the Council may take up, either now or in the future.
Today’s article explores the point system that determines which faculty and staff are eligible to buy football tickets.
Ohio State’s switch to semesters in 2012 has turned many football ticket dollar signs into question marks.
The debate surrounding football ticket distribution after OSU’s semester switch is “also the time to take up a lot of other issues,” said Karen Mancl, a faculty member of the Athletic Council and chair of the Finance and Facilities Subcommittee.
One of those issues is a complex point system that determines which faculty and staff members are eligible to buy tickets.
Some have argued it benefits higher-paid employees more than those who have worked at OSU for a long time.
For faculty, points are first assigned based on rank. For example, a full professor is awarded 35 points and a lecturer 15, the lowest number.
Then, for every year faculty members have worked for OSU, they receive an additional point.
Staff members receive the bulk of their points based on their salaries. A salary of $55,000 is enough to place a staff member at 35 points, the same as a professor.
At the other end of the spectrum are lower-paid staff members, making less than $20,000 a year. They are awarded only 10 points.
There is also an additional three-year waiting period before staff can purchase tickets.
Last season, faculty and staff needed 36 points to buy football tickets, but Mancl said the number could vary from year to year based on demand.
Mancl’s message is grim for lower-paid staff members with fewer points.
“A staff person can work here their whole career and never qualify for football tickets,” she said.
On its surface, the point system was designed to reward people who have attained a high rank and put in many years of service.
But Mancl, a professor of engineering, said whatever its original intentions, the system is now unfair.
She pointed out the fact that in many cases, it is very difficult — or even “impossible,” she said — for an assistant professor to buy tickets.
At 25 points, an assistant professor would generally have to work at the university for more than 10 years to earn enough points to purchase tickets. But often tenure decisions are made after six or seven years. The assistant professor, in most cases, will have either moved up in rank or have left the university.
OSU staff members, depending on their salaries, might find it just as difficult to purchase tickets.
Susan Saffell, a fiscal officer for the Office of Student Life, has spent 11 years at OSU and doesn’t have a football ticket stub to show for it.
“I just figured, ‘Well, maybe I’ll try next year,’ and some years you do and some years you don’t,” she said. She has signed up for tickets at least five of the 11 years she has worked for OSU, she said.
“I never understood how the point system worked,” she said. “Period.”
But she said she hopes next year will be the year she finally gets football tickets. She was promoted from a job that awarded 20 points to a higher-paid position that awards 25.
The University Staff Advisory Council, an organization that advocates for administrative staff, has recommended proposals to the Athletic Council that would restructure the point system, said the group’s chair Amy Ehrlich.
The most recent proposal dealt with updating the salary levels, but Ehrlich said that ideally the group would like to see years of service more fairly balanced with salary.
“We understand that it’s not perfect, and some people won’t always get what they want,” she said, “but we think it could be fairer.”
Saffell said the focus on staff salaries seemed like “a status issue, and that’s where I don’t think that it’s fair,” she said.
The main culprit, Mancl said, is that the point system is “outdated.”
The inequity is a “function of the fact that this point system is so old” and has rarely been updated since the 1980s, she said.
The system’s age shows in the top bracket of salary levels. In the mid-1980s, $55,000 was worth more than it is now.
There are likely people being hired for upper-echelon administrative and technical positions that have starting salaries much higher than $55,000, Mancl said.
“It’s likely that a lot of the new hires could be up in these high levels and come in with a lot of points and very quickly qualify for tickets,” she said.
When the Council discussed the point system at the March meeting, one member described it as some “unknown algorithm,” which elicited laughter from the Council.
But the joke might not be far from the truth.
Although the actual method of assigning points is known, the rationale remains unknown, Mancl said.
“We have no documentation on the thinking behind the point system,” she said. “We’re not able to find anything in [meeting] minutes or any documents that really lay out what all the thinking was.”
At that earlier March meeting, Mancl said the lack of written records on the point system was “coming back to haunt us.”
Another complication is the addition of auxiliary employees in the faculty and staff ticket pool. These employees, such as visiting and adjunct professors and some clinical staff at the dental clinic and OSU Medical Center, are not paid directly by OSU.
But they still qualify for points, albeit in a slightly modified system.
“In 2010, this is not a small group of people,” Mancl said. But she has no specific numbers because the Human Resources
Department does not have many of their records on file.
The subcommittee has now begun trying to find out how many auxiliary employees are eligible to buy tickets and how many actually do, she said.
When students leave the university, their days of getting good seats for discount prices end with the toss of their graduation caps. If they want to continue to buy tickets, they have to join the Alumni Association.
But some faculty members — Mancl said she is not sure of specific numbers — are able to purchase season football tickets every year, even after retiring.
That’s because after retiring, they still keep some of their points. The points corresponding with their years of service are cut in half after retirement, but they keep the ones associated with their rank.
Because higher-ranked faculty and the highest paid staff start out with so many points to begin with, the loss of these points often has little effect on their ability to purchase tickets after retiring, she said.
In fact, in a subcommittee report to the full Council in March, Mancl revealed that retirees purchase 23 percent of faculty and staff tickets.
Mancl wouldn’t specifically say if the subcommittee would consider a point system that would limit retirees’ access, only that it would consider everything.
But Peter Koltak, a student representative on the Council, said limiting retirees’ access to full-season tickets made sense to him.
He compared retirees’ purchasing power to corporate benefits.
“If you retire from the company, how likely is it that you’re still able to take out the company car?” said Koltak, a fourth-year in journalism and international studies.
But before any decision can or should be made, Mancl said, the Council first has to determine speci
fic numbers where now there are only question marks.
