In August 2020, Davidson voluntarily committed to paying all full-time staff a living wage for Mecklenburg County as calculated by MIT’s Living Wage Calculator. Since then, the commitment has disappeared from public view, and the college has not addressed why. The living wage commitment was part of Davidson’s reconciliation efforts in response to the Commission on Race and Slavery’s report, which documented Davidson’s history with slavery and its practice of hiring Black residents into low-paid campus jobs while keeping them largely out of the classroom.
Since a 2021 update to the commission’s web pages, the college has posted no new wage figure, stopped using the MIT calculator, retired the pages that traced the commitment, and put no wage numbers in the “Reconciliation and Education” pages that replaced them. It did not announce any of these changes. Davidson made a measurable promise, of its own volition, since the commission’s report did not call for a living wage, then quietly dropped the measure. The college confirmed the change only when asked for this story.
Promises
The commission, chaired by alumnus and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, made five sets of recommendations: a formal apology and public commemoration of enslaved people’s contributions; continued research into the college’s founding and its earliest donors; a standing committee “empowered to act” on new historical findings, paired with hiring a full-time public historian or archivist to oversee that work; continued investment in campus culture; and sustained, direct outreach to Black residents of Davidson. In response, Davidson posted “Towards Equity and Racial Justice: Davidson College Initial Actions,” in which the college went further than the report itself, committing to a specific standard for employee compensation: “We will ensure that all regular Davidson employees make at least a living wage for Mecklenburg County as determined by the MIT living wage calculator (currently $13.15/hr).” At 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that wage comes out to $26,300. In 2021, the page was revised, citing the calculator again and raising the minimum wage to $15.50 an hour, or $31,000 annually.
The pages were supposed to get an “annual update,” yet the next update was not posted until March 2023 in which new Africana Studies hires and diversity training for faculty and staff were covered. It did not mention wages, and no further wage figure was ever posted.
The two pages documenting the report and the ensuing campus changes, “Commission Report and Initial Actions” and “Post-Commission Initiatives and Progress,” are no longer live on davidson.edu. Both were retired this past spring and replaced by a new “Reconciliation and Education” section of the website, which does not include a wage figure or any numeric tracking of the commitment the earlier pages described. Asked why a page meant to receive an “annual update” went nearly three years without one before being retired, the communications office wrote only, “We should have updated them sooner.”
The pages are not entirely gone. They remain accessible as archived PDFs in a Google Drive folder linked from the new “Reconciliation and Education” page.
Where the Number Stands Today
Davidson, in response to this reporting, confirmed to the Lux that the wage floor for all full-time staff still sits at $15.50 an hour, unchanged from 2021. As of October 2026, the MIT calculator places the living wage in Mecklenburg County for a single adult with no children at $25.53 an hour, about $51,060 a year. Davidson’s floor falls $10.03 an hour short of that, or about $20,000 a year. For comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, $15.50 in 2021 has the same buying power as $19.85 does today. Even without the MIT comparison, the floor has lost about a fifth of its value, seeming to indicate that the minimum wage for the college should have risen at least with inflation.
Further, not only is this information unavailable to the public, but it is also unavailable to potential hires, because Davidson’s job postings do not list pay. While the postings do say the college offers, “a competitive salary package,” a 9.5% retirement contribution, tuition assistance, and professional development, they leave out the wage itself.
Davidson is not the only institution in Mecklenburg County that has used the MIT Living Wage Calculator to set pay. The county government has too, and its number is public. In fact, the county government raised its own minimum wage specifically to meet the MIT standard this September.
What Davidson Says
When asked what Davidson’s minimum wage is, whether it is still tied to MIT, and when it was last changed, Mark Johnson, Davidson’s Chief Communications and Marketing Officer answered in writing that, “The college’s minimum starting hourly wage is $15.50 … We have not updated the MIT calculation, because it quickly became clear that the formula was out of line with our market. We instead benchmark against multiple salary surveys that look at higher education peers or similar-sized industries in our region, depending on the job and recruitment pool.”
That answer has a kernel of truth, but it also points to a larger issue. A living wage asks what an employer must pay for a worker to cover basic costs; a market survey asks what an employer can pay and still hire and keep workers. This is not to say that the MIT calculator is beyond criticism, though. Economist Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute argued in a critique last year that its totals run high because they add up average household spending rather than true minimums, assume center-based child care, price housing at an arbitrary rent percentile, and in some categories double-count costs. His own, more conservative estimate for a family came in roughly a third below MIT’s figure for the county he examined. Winship’s critique is mostly about family budgets. The $25.53 figure is for a single adult with no children, where childcare is not factored in, so much of the double-counting does not apply.
Davidson has not offered a methodological argument like Winship’s, however. The only rebuttal to using the calculator the college has shared is that it is “out of line with our market.” When the Calculator called for higher pay than Davidson judged the market required, the college chose the market.
Whatever the calculator’s flaws, a living wage standard was never supposed to track the market. It was meant to pay above it. The college chose that standard itself and publicized it, tying it to its own history of underpaying Black labor. Finding out later that the standard paid more than the market should not have been a surprise. Mecklenburg County, in the same labor market, adopted the same calculator and has not treated that outcome as disqualifying.
When pressed for specifics, Davidson eventually named six sources it says it benchmarks against: CUPA-HR (the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources), used for staff and faculty roles broadly; the Oberlin Group of Libraries, for library professionals; CLAC, the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges, for IT roles; the Catapult Employers Association, for positions not specific to higher education; Payscale, which the college says it uses across all positions because it allows different geographic and industry cuts; and Marsh, for executive and director-level compensation. Davidson did not describe any of the six as a benchmark built around entry-level service work such as dining, physical plant, and grounds staff, where the $15.50 floor is most likely to apply.
Compensation Growth Numbers
While initially reluctant to share detailed salary information, the college said total salary and benefits grew 7.7% in FY2023, 8.0% in FY2024, 6.1% in FY2025, and 7.1% in FY2026, or a compounded 32.17% over four years. The college called last year’s increase “double or triple” the higher education average CUPA-HR cites. CUPA-HR’s most recent data does show that higher ed staff (clerical, custodial, and food service) positions received a median salary increase of 3.0% this year, the highest of any employee category. Yet, Davidson’s 7.1% is total salary and benefits; CUPA-HR’s 3.0% is a median salary raise.
The core problem is that these figures encapsulate the entire payroll, so they are skewed by the highest-paying jobs. Administrators and faculty making 100-300k (or more) getting 4% increases, can easily tip the overall compensation increase across the entire college to over 7%. So, lower level hourly-paid employees could get much smaller raises and it would be completely obfuscated. For example a 4% raise on a $300,000 salary is $12,000; a 3% raise on a $31,000 salary is $930.
To extend this example, we can turn to Davidson’s FY2025 Form 990 filed in May 2026- and available on ProPublica. It reports “executive compensation” of $3,504,120, or the pay of about 113 workers at $31,000. The Part VII total including coaches and “highly compensated employees” amounts to $5,009,888, or 162 workers. Each $100,000 administrator equals about three wage-floor workers. President Doug Hicks alone received $597,223 in reportable compensation, the equivalent of 19 floor workers. He also received $245,563 in “other” compensation, for a total of $842,786, or about 27 floor workers in all.
Other things that can inflate a total-pay figure include benefits costs (health insurance premiums), new positions, and one-time benefits, and the college has not broken out any of them. All of this makes it incredibly difficult to decipher whether compensation is doing what the college says it is.
So, who is actually paid at the floor? Davidson did not say how many staff are at or near $15.50 per hour. Johnson simply said that “At any given time the number of employees at that rate depends on the position and the candidate’s level of experience.” Dining hall staff interviewed for this piece described raises as “almost yearly” and “pretty consistent,” which suggests 15.50 is a true starting rate, and not a rate at which many workers stay. The size of those raises, and how far they close the gap to $25.53 is unknown.
Same Yardstick, Different Results
In its FY2027 budget, adopted this summer, Mecklenburg County raised the minimum wage for its full-time employees from $20 an hour to $25.53 an hour. The budget office describes the figure as based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator for Mecklenburg County. Commissioner Mark Jerrell, addressing the vote, said the county did not consider the new rate the end of the effort. “No one is saying that $25.53 is something that we should take a victory lap with,” he said. The county and Davidson started from the same benchmark. The county’s figure moved with it; Davidson’s did not.
UNC Charlotte, which is also in Mecklenburg County, raised its minimum starting wage for regular staff at $17.00 an hour, effective Sept. 1, 2026, up from $16.12 set in January 2025. Jason Vaughan, associate director of media relations at UNC Charlotte, credited the increase to “UNC Charlotte senior leadership’s ongoing commitment to raising employee salaries.” UNC Charlotte’s floor has risen in recent years, and Davidson’s has not.
Duke University, North Carolina’s other prominent private school, tells a similar story. Duke raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour this year, up from $18 in 2024 and $12 in 2015. Duke is not in the same county as Davidson and has not cited the MIT Living Wage Calculator, but the trend line is the point. Duke’s base pay has continued climbing; Davidson’s has not moved since 2021.
Why Does This Matter?
What this amounts to is a change in standard that was never announced. Davidson moved from a living wage metric to a cost-comparison metric, a number tied to what other employers choose to pay. Only the college’s response to this reporting is what reveals the change happened at all. A market standard measures what competitors have decided they can pay and still fill a position. It does not measure whether that pay covers a worker’s basic costs.
Davidson may well be paying competitively within higher education, as it says, but that claim is largely unverifiable. The college has named the surveys it uses but not which of them, if any, price the positions at the $15.50 floor. It has not said what share of staff is paid near that floor, or what full compensation packages those employees receive. Without that information, neither the old promise to meet a living wage nor the new standard of matching the market can be verified. The wage commitment was offered as a repair for underpaid Black labor at Davidson, and the measure that could show, without a doubt, whether the repair is working is the one the college has stopped using.