Professional Memberships? How does your Institution handle them?

[professing]

I've had different experiences with reimbursement for professional memberships from different institutions, so I am trying to get a sense of expectations / standards. One institution reimbursed memberships in professional organizations without hesitation. Another will only reimburse if there is a conference discount or evidence of need.

Since we need to be members of professional field organizations to do our job, and are also evaluated annually based on our professional service (which requires membership), I have had a hard time understanding this argument.

Have others experienced the same? What is the origin of this discrepancy?

[mamselle]

The size of the budget of the respective department, I'd guess...

I've worked for people who had everything reimbursed, even the courses they had to take to keep up their accreditation in some field or other.

Others paid out of pocket, until we got an alternative organized.

Can you build it into a relevant grant accounting stream?

M.

[professing]

Can you build it into a relevant grant accounting stream?

M.

Thanks for the response. That's the funny part. This policy appears to hold true whether I secure external funds or not. And it doesn't appear to be applied similarly in different units. There is an institutional policy which is used to justify this, but it is vague.

[Liquidambar]

Ah ha ha ha.  No, my institution doesn't want to pay for professional memberships, and we're not allowed to cover them with grant funds.  The exception is if you do a service that comes with "research funds" as compensation.  You can use those to cover professional society memberships.  Unfortunately, my society renewal is due every fall, but my research funds aren't available until spring, so I am late every year.

[professing]

thanks for the response. I guess what's confusing is some institutions do cover these and some don't. Is there a standard or is this just institution to institution? Or is this the new normal? It doesn't make much sense if these are expected for us to do our job.

[AJ_Katz]

thanks for the response. I guess what's confusing is some institutions do cover these and some don't. Is there a standard or is this just institution to institution? Or is this the new normal? It doesn't make much sense if these are expected for us to do our job.

We are not allowed to use grant or state funds for membership fees.  We are, however, allowed to use unrestricted accounts that are usually from gifts / contracted work.  Those unrestricted accounts are not under the same funding umbrella as as the grant / state accounts.

I also agree with your last statement.  It makes no sense that we are expected to pay out-of-pocket for membership fees.  I get no personal gain from those memberships, they are only of professional value AND provide a discount on meeting registration fees, which is a professional benefit, not a personal benefit. 


I also do not know why institutions will not agree to pay for professional memberships.  It must be a common system now because my professional society now offers the option to register for the meeting and also get the membership at the same time (it's called something like "registration plus"), which allows us to use our state / grant accounts for this since it only shows up as a registration fee. 

If someone out there has insight, I would also be interested in knowing why organizations don't want us to get reimbursed for memberships fees.  Perhaps memberships are too easily abused or can be misconstrued by auditors / public as non-professional expenses.

[polly_mer]

You folks do know you can deduct from your taxes professional membership fees and other unreimbursed professional expenses, right?  Keep good records and it's straightforward.  If individuals don't have enough expenses of this type to itemize, then the assumption in many quarters is it's not big enough to complain about.

I guess what's confusing is some institutions do cover these and some don't.

What I've noticed is institutions that truly value research and have the resources in place to support research tend to have the expectation that professors will use their research funds to cover professional memberships.

A handful of institutions that are really research institutions, but have a substantial amount of funding from federal programs with very strict rules on how research funds can be spent tend to have rules related to what the institution gets from an individual professional membership (e.g., the institution will pay if the member discount for conference registration is larger than the annual membership).  One rule my non-academic institution has is that if one truly cannot do a mandated job task without being a member of the professional society, then the institution will pay (e.g., sitting on a standards committee at ASME).

Institutions that encourage research, but aren't really research institutions in terms of research support tend to be tighter with the funds and again ask specifically how the institution benefits from a specific individual being a member of a specific professional society.

Institutions that have very limited resources all around almost never pay for individual professional memberships because it's very likely those funds would be better spent elsewhere, usually institutional memberships related to the overall functioning of the institution (e.g., Council of Independent Colleges, Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges).

In other words, while being a member of your professional societies may provide benefit to you doing your job, often membership itself isn't absolutely necessary.  I can think of several very public discussions at one subunit of a professional society when formal, paid membership was low, but attendance and participation was high so a very frustrated officer pointed out, "We're going to be disbanded because you folks won't pony up the $150 to join.  You've spent far more than that to be here at the conference for the week."

[Cheerful]

R1.  We can use grant funds to pay membership fees in professional associations.  Department will pay membership fee if we are presenting at a conference sponsored by the relevant association. 

Academics paying for their own membership fees, conference attendance, etc. is sad and wrong, IMHO.

[Ruralguy]

We pay for it. Its probably unusual for a 100-ish ranked SLAC with minimal scholarship expectations, but we let people use their 1000 bucks annual scholarship money for travel,
member dues, fees for meetings, even books to an extent, and usually small amounts for equipment, supplies and software, etc..  Once again, the advantages at being at a private school---sometimes we do stupid things, but I do enjoy the lack of red tape, and for the limited amount of funds we have, we do encourage scholarship when we can.

[Ruralguy]

Sorry, when I said "we," I meant the college, via department funds of various types.

[clean]

I have 3 professional designations and 2 licenses.  I write 5 checks a year for the privilege of being such a good test taker.  Neither my current not my former employer ever paid for any of these!

Technically, I do get one designation comped by the organization (or at least they did) because I was the Faculty Liaison (or something like that).  They stopped that last year.  Fortunately I had already completed my  3 year CE cycle so my designation is good through 2023 and I have not paid the fee, and I am not going to.  I will let that designation lapse once I am required(supposed) to renew my CE requirements.  We no longer offer the class that was related to the designation, and the professional organization has cut its student friendly programs, so when my designation expires, I will take it off my CV.

Anyway, long story to say that I have never had university support for my licenses and designations.  I am likely to let them expire over the next few years, as I approach my projected retirement date in five years.  As few in my department have them, and the university doesnt financial support them, and Im unlikely to be on the job market where they may give me something to let my application stand out, better to keep the money!!

[Hibush]

Membership fees are not an allowed Federal expense, so you can't put it on Federal grants or Federal flow-through funds. That restriction drives many institutions to disallow them for consistency. 

[Vkw10]

You folks do know you can deduct from your taxes professional membership fees and other unreimbursed professional expenses, right?  Keep good records and it's straightforward.  If individuals don't have enough expenses of this type to itemize, then the assumption in many quarters is it's not big enough to complain about.

The federal tax deduction for unreimbursed employee expenses was eliminated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

[arcturus]

When I was a graduate student, eons ago, I heard that membership dues for professional associations was often covered by employers, once you were in a tenure-track position. However, I have never had that offered as a perk by any of my employers. Nonetheless, it is my understanding that it is my interest to continue to support the professional association for my discipline, and I do think it is useful to attend their annunal meetings occasionally, so I continue to send in my $$.  On the other hand, my R1 is trying to increase the number of "fellows" in its ranks, and thus recently announced that they would pick up the membership fees in perpetuity if you were elected as a AAAS fellow (which requires at least four years as a member before you can be nominated to be a fellow). So there is that.

[Parasaurolophus]

I always maintain one professional membership (for the North American society in my subfield). I typically have at least one other professional membership, sometimes as many as five. (But mostly 2-3 these days, as I slow my conferencing a bit.)

My institution does not reimburse them. It possibly could, if I gave a talk at a conference, provided I counted it as part of my 'professional development' hours and applied for the funding. But there would be much better uses for that funding, since these memberships are not too expensive.