Faculty and Staff Benefit Updates for 2024-2025
July 18, 2024
Dear CMU Faculty and Staff,
On behalf of Carnegie Mellon’s academic and administrative leadership, I am thrilled to announce updates to three key university benefit plans: tuition reimbursement; staff maternity and parental leave; and bereavement.
These updates expand coverage in all three plans, effective July 1, 2024, and include:
- For staff: Reducing the dependent tuition plan waiting period from five years of service to three years of service and increasing the maximum annual tuition reimbursement benefit for dependents attending a non-CMU institution from $6,820 to $10,230. Eligible dependents of staff members attending CMU will continue to have the full cost of their tuition covered. The dependent tuition reimbursement plan for faculty remains unchanged.
- For faculty and staff: Updating the definition of “dependent children” to include stepchildren and the children of domestic partners as well as expanding the tuition reimbursement program eligibility to include trade school certifications.
- For staff: Increasing coverage for a gestational parent to 100% of pay for the full period of their maternity leave (six to eight weeks, depending on the type of birth) as well as increasing coverage for a new parent (via a birth, adoption, foster care or legal guardianship) to 100% pay for six weeks.
- For faculty and staff: Expanding eligibility and length of bereavement benefits.
Please note: These changes apply to CMU's global faculty and staff body. Employees at our international locations will receive a separate communication that introduces these benefit changes within the context of their ongoing international benefit offerings.
The complete set of changes extend beyond the examples listed above, and I encourage you to review the full benefits update as outlined by our Human Resources team.
These developments follow a multiyear, multiphase initiative by CMU to maximize benefit gains for faculty, staff and the institution at large. This process began in 2019, when our Human Resources team surveyed faculty and staff to identify their top benefits priorities and preferences, and it continued through this year, when we completed an independent benchmarking study comparing CMU’s benefit offerings to company offerings elsewhere in Pittsburgh and nationwide.
I am grateful to all faculty and staff who participated in these reviews and shared their benefit priorities and preferences. I also want to thank our Human Resources team for their hard work in realizing these changes and their ongoing efforts to evaluate the benefit offerings available to our campus community. Finally, I’d like to thank the members of our Total Compensation Committee for their leadership and counsel in shepherding these changes through to completion.
More broadly and worth repeating: I am immensely proud of and thankful for Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff, and I am confident that we will continue to advance our academic and research mission together — and in extraordinary ways — in the year ahead.
With appreciation,
Farnam Jahanian
President
Henry L. Hillman President’s Chair