Total rewards are a key recruiting and retention tool since job candidates and employees pay close attention to what employers offer. Employee benefits can help a total rewards package stand out from the competition — but their cost must be carefully managed because it represents a large portion of an institution’s budget. That’s why it’s essential for higher ed HR professionals to spend benefits dollars wisely.

To make confident decisions about benefits, one of the things higher ed decision-makers need to know is what other institutions are offering.

About CUBS

CUBS is the most detailed higher education employee benefit benchmark study in the U.S. Segal has conducted CUBS biennially since 2012. CUBS draws on information from our proprietary database of over 400 private and public higher education institutions.

The 2024 CUBS examined health and well-being benefits, including prescription drug coverage and mental health services; tuition benefits; financial security benefits, including retirement-income plans; leave programs including salary continuance and sabbaticals; and life-stage benefits offered to these employee groups: faculty, administrative and professional staff, and clerical and support staff.

How can CUBS help you?

Benchmarking your institution’s benefits against its peers helps identify where it may not be competitive.

It can also help isolate benefits that should be refined or better promoted to your workforce.

And notably, since institutions still face budget constraints, using benchmarks is a great way to help prioritize where to invest in benefits.

Key findings

2024 CUBS key findings about health benefits include:

• Institutions picked up more of the health plan cost increases than their faculty and staff as institutions have held down contribution increases, which helps to make coverage affordable for them.
• There were few plan design changes since the 2022 CUBS, but the changes were meaningful. Institutions made changes to several key preferred provider organization/point-of-service plan provisions: deductibles, emergency room copayments, prescription drug standalone deductibles and various prescription drug copayments. Specialty drug copayments were among the provisions most often increased.
• Medical/Rx trends have remained somewhat low, in the 5 to 7 percent range, after plan design changes.
• For a large majority of institutions, high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) play a significant role in their medical plan offerings and continue to lead the way as a lower-cost alternative for faculty and staff. Note that while there was significant growth in HDHPs over the last several years, the increase in HDHP offerings has seemingly plateaued.
• Use of Health Reimbursement Arrangements is in decline, as intuitions favor using Health Savings Accounts as their preferred type of account plan.
• Institutions continue to offer additional services that promote health, well-being and financial security or highlight more of these services through enhanced communications efforts. This makes sense given that the need for assistance with stress, mental health issues, financial concerns and substance use surged during the pandemic and has not slowed since then.
• Institutions are offering digital therapeutic solutions to expand provider networks, improve access and increase engagement. Digital solutions have helped address the mental health provider shortage and improve utilization in particular chronic condition-management programs, such as diabetes, musculoskeletal concerns and hypertension.
• Institutions are expanding the wellness initiatives they offer and highlighting/communicating them more visibly to faculty and staff.

Institutions continue to expand employee assistance program service offerings and promote understanding and utilization of these services with increased communications and by highlighting those offerings on their websites.

CUBS also found:

• Paid family leave programs are growing in prevalence in response to social conditions, led by state mandates and the call for expanded leave policies nationally.
• Life-stage benefits (a package of benefits of which employees choose to use certain benefits at different stages of their life) that can be offered at little to no cost by institutions continues to be a growing part of the higher ed benefits package.

There’s more in CUBS!

CUBS also:

• Includes strategies and insights related to the study findings that institutions can use to strengthen their benefit offerings and/or manage costs
• Points out differentiators — the offerings that help higher ed stand out from employers in other industries when competing for top talent
• Outlines a well-defined process for optimizing the role of benefits in total rewards, one of the pillars of the employee value proposition