UBC employees are some of the highest paid by a public body in BC — with Medicine and Sauder faculty topping UBC’s list of salaries last year.
As a public university, UBC is required by the Financial Information Act to disclose the salaries of employees who make over $75,000 a year. The most recent report includes salaries from March 2022 to March 2023 and represents just over $1.7 billion in employee earnings.
Dawn Jia, the CEO of UBC Investment Management (IMANT) was the highest-paid UBC employee last year with a salary of $994,000. IMANT manages over $5 billion for UBC, between the university’s endowment, staff pension plan and other revenues.
Jia’s 2020/21 salary of $921,413, made her the highest-paid public sector employee in BC. Her salary was surpassed this past year by the CEO and two managing directors of Powerex, BC Hydro’s trading subsidiary, each of whom made around $1.25 million.
The rest of the top ten paid employees are business and medicine faculty members.
The second highest paid is Dermot Kelleher, the dean of Medicine and UBC’s vice president, health. The Sauder School of Business’s current and former deans — Darren Dahl and Robert Helsley — take the third and fourth spots.
In previous years, UBC’s president has also appeared in the top ten, but with Santa Ono’s departure last October landing in the middle of this disclosure period, he landed the 127 spot with a salary of $316,000.
Deans’ salaries
Dahl and Keller’s salaries are also far above the next highest-paid dean, Science Dean Meigan Aronson.
The average dean’s salary was $389,000. Arts, UBC’s largest faculty by enrolment, has been excluded from the average as former dean Gage Averill’s departureto serve as UBC’s provost meant no one was Arts dean for the entire report period.
There’s no clear correlation between faculty size or dean’s seniority to salary — Sauder is smaller than Applied Science and Science for example, and Land and Food Systems Dean Rickey Yada has been in the role since 2014.
Two people on the list, Mary MacDougall and Michael Coughtrie, are no longer deans but were included since they held the dean positions until after March 2023.
How do UBC’s salaries stack up with other universities?
In 2020/21, a third of the top 100 highest-paid employees in BC were UBC employees. UVic’s then-president was the only employee from another university who made the list, at 88th.
But as the largest university in the province, the list doesn't include a similarly sized institution to compare UBC with.
The University of Toronto (UofT) is a closer match to UBC in terms of enrolment and endowment size, and it is required to disclose salaries over $100,000.
In comparison to UofT, UBC doesn’t appear to be as much of an outlier.
Both universities pay about 5,000 employees over $100,000 a year. UofT’s top ten highest-paid employees are all business professors, making around $470,000–$600,000.
Notably, employees of UofT’s asset management corporation do not appear on its public salary disclosure, so there is no direct comparison for Jia’s salary.
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