By SUSAN JONES
The Senate’s Dependent Care Ad Hoc Committee has completed its work with some strong recommendations that committee chair Anna Wang-Erickson, an assistant professor of pediatrics in Pitt’s School of Medicine, presented at the Nov. 29 Faculty Assembly meeting.
“Essentially, we have four very straightforward and easy to implement recommendations,” Wang-Erickson said. “We have meticulously dealt with every technical or logistical roadblock that was raised. And we have concluded that there are no real reasons to not implement these recommendations. Cost is not even an issue.”
One of the main concerns when the committee was first formed was that “the University’s current practices and policies on dependent care were detrimental to the academic and research climate,” she said.
“Because financial policy FN28 explicitly prohibits dependent care expenses, people weren’t allowed to leverage the funding they already were awarded specifically for dependent care,” she said. “And that put us at odds with funder priorities and stated DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) goals. And then when people are prohibited from using the grants they’ve worked so hard to get, that hurts morale and productivity and ultimately affects recruitment and retention.”
The committee heard about three cases of students and postdocs who were barred from claiming the NIH child care supplements they were awarded, which was contrary to the practices of Pitt’s peers. Also, for over a decade, federal grants have allowed people to charge certain child care expenses to their grants to attend conferences and meetings, but no one at Pitt had been allowed to do so. And finally a Pitt Seed-funded initiative that would have distributed modest dependent care grants to enable faculty, staff and students to attend similar professional development events was prevented from launching.
Interim language was developed by the committee to amend FN28 — University Travel, Business Entertainment, Honoraria, and Miscellaneous Reimbursable Expense Policy — to fix this problem, but they were told that “this issue did not qualify for an interim change process.” Instead a committee was chartered to review the full FN28 policy — which Senate President Robin Kear said is one of the largest policies she’s every seen. That committee began its work in August 2022 and continues to meet.
Wang-Erickson said after several months, they were able to clear up a misunderstanding about federal grant guidelines with the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, and eventually establish the current temporary exception that allows people to use either care.com or grants or both concurrently for dependent care costs provided that they’re not reimbursed for more than their expense. However, the use of internal funds is still prohibited.
After studying how fringe benefits work at Pitt and what other peer institutions were doing in regard to dependent care, the committee came up with four recommendations:
1. Change FN28 to allow dependent care expenses from all available funding sources, both internal and external.
Wang-Erickson said that the temporary blanket exception “that allows the use of external funding is certainly welcome progress, but is a stopgap measure.” She said this change would be revenue positive, “and without this change, we wouldn’t be able to fully leverage the resources we already have or be able to practically administer future programs.” The language in FN28 should be clearly worded to allow use of external and internal funds, she said, because “allowing internal funding is also more equitable to those who don’t have as much access to external grants.”
2. Establish a new dependent care voucher fringe benefit.
Vouchers have the benefit of flexibility, she said. They can be used on the regional campuses, for child or elder care and at any provider of choice. She said Pitt could use its defined dollar benefit program for retirees — which provides almost $10,000 per year for every eligible retirees to use toward medical coverage — as a template for this program.
“Because there are far fewer people who have dependent care expenses compared to the number of retirees who could be retired for up to 25 years, a similarly structured dependent care program would only be about 0.3 percent of the total fringe pool. … And since fringe costs can be recovered from grants and contracts, this additional cost for a dependent care program would be almost negligible. But the positive impact is significant since dependent care vouchers would support the productivity of people who are actively working for the university and would increase the labor supply and the number of women in the workforce.”
3. Establish dependent care professional development grants.
She suggested this could be structured like other existing internal travel grants or emergency fund programs. “The annual cost of these programs can be very small,” Wang-Erickson said. “One university budgets less than $50,000 a year for their university-wide program, and they have never exceeded that amount, not even close. This is because these programs support only additional expenses above and beyond the cost of regular care for the purpose of attending a professional conference or meeting.”
4. Add one full-time employee to HR to administer these new programs.
“Many other universities have multiple staff dedicated to managing dependent care or work-life programs,” Wang-Erickson said.
The one issue the committee has left unresolved as it concludes its work is who or what units decide whether a new fringe benefit may be created.
“We know that new fringe benefits have been created — Care.com is a relatively new fringe benefit,” she said. “And though I presented many reasons why implementing our recommendations are all around a win-win for the University, I mention this in case progress has stalled at the stage of creating the fringe benefit. This might be something the Senate would need to pursue.”
Kear said she thinks the committee “has left us in a really good spot to move forward with trying to pursue these for non-represented faculty through the Benefits & Welfare committee.”
Chris Bonneau, immediate past president of the Senate, noted that the current situation among faculty represented by the Union of Pitt Faculty, which is in the middle of negotiating its first contract, “at least in the short term is the biggest impediment to making any progress or changes, but that certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and we shouldn’t push.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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