SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fifteen of the University of California’s highest-paid executives are getting a 3 percent raise to keep pace with the cost of living and help the system hold onto its top talent, the university’s governing board decided Thursday.

The Board of Regents voted to boost the base pay of five of the university’s 10 campus chancellors, the chiefs of the medical centers in San Francisco, San Diego and Davis, the system’s provost, general counsel and principal investment strategist, and four other senior managers.

The group will make an average of $552,183 annually, ranging from $231,750 for regents Chief of Staff Anne Shaw to $991,942 for University of California, San Francisco CEO Mark Laret.

The money for six of the raises, including Laret’s, will not include any taxpayer funds, according to background documents presented to the board.

UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein said the 3 percent increases mirror cost-of-living adjustments that all other UC employees not represented by unions are receiving, including most faculty and staff.

The board discussed the raises in a closed session on Wednesday and voted without comment Thursday.

Regent Bonnie Reiss, who chairs the board’s compensation committee, said executives who had been in their jobs for under a year or received a pay raise during the past 12 months were excluded from the latest round of increases. They included the five campus chancellors who collected much bigger raises in September.

The vote came a day after UC President Janet Napolitano announced she would raise the hourly minimum wage for university employees and contract workers who log at least 20 hours a week to $15 by 2017.

UC Berkeley undergraduate Kevin Sabo, acting president of the University of California Student Association, said after the meeting that he was concerned the regents did not take greater pains to explain why the raises were merited.

Sabo noted that graduate students earning degrees in nursing and other professional fields will be paying higher tuition this fall under a plan approved by the Napolitano and the board.

“We always hear this talk about market competition and there is this comparison with private industry, but no one talks about market competition for grad students or for staff, so many groups get left behind,” Sabo said.