The excessive salaries of some college presidents send a message at odds with higher education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/opinion/frank-bruni-platinum-pay-in-ivory-towers.html
Excessive compared to what?
According to the article, the President of Yale was getting $1M/year.
Considering that Bill Nye got $35,000 for one commencement talk (30-45 minutes?) and Elizabeth Warren got hundreds of thousands to teach one class, seems that it is a bargain.
The average prof at Yale makes around 198k in salary. Having the President make 5 times that seems perfectly reasonable.
As for the opening example of U of T.
The average salary of a Prof is around $140k.
There are 11 economics professors who average $190k
10 Petroleum profs making $175k.
16 Chem profs making $180k.
12 Finance at $236k
And the highest paid group is the one prof in African Studies making $240k
I would expect that many profs supplement their income from consulting and project work.
So $1M is reasonable in light of that.
These people are the CEOs of major institutions. What do you expect them to earn?
It would be nice if you quoted the beginning part of the article:
"Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million.
And he rejected it — as too much."
Greg Fenves was an engineering prof at UT for a long time - he was there when I was in school in the mid-'80s. He’s a standup guy and one of my dad’s friends. Dad is thrilled that he’s going to be the president of UT.
“These people are the CEOs of major institutions. What do you expect them to earn?”
I agree. I look at the president of S’s school and not only is the guy running a major research university …, he’s running a major medical center that is one of the city’s leading employers and providers of health care with numerous hospitals … a major business school with all the glad-handling and connections that entails … a major law school, ditto … a theater school that requires substantial glad-handling with Hollywood and NYC powers that be … a journalism school that can at any moment (and has been) embroiled in investigative journalism scandals … as well as involvement with the government in terms of research grants that make up roughly 1/3 of the schools’ funding … glad-handling major donors … traveling extensively to help build that international footprint … overseeing the Middle East campus … and of course worrying about the safety and security of 8000 undergrads. I think he’s doing a heroic job and it’s a major, major set of responsibilities - akin to running a Fortune 50 company. I don’t think seven figures is out of line at all.
The only problem with that analogy is that, with very few exceptions, there are no comparisons between the responsibilities and demands of the real CEOs and their academic counterparts. There are no quarterly “checks” and ever increasing pressures from shareholders or other corporate raiders. Just look at the Apple battle with its shareholders.
In contrast, most academic leadership position are plum jobs for people who have connections. The old gentlemen clubs are active and doing well. It’s mostly a community of white hair older men who exchange favors and build a mutual admiration society. The pay and perks, while not comparable to the CEO at many large companies, are substantial and very generous considering the … time spent working.
The biggest issue is that the growth at the pinnacle of the academic food chain is unabated --with some obscene compensation such as the one paid by RPI to its Empress-- and that many administrative underlings have their salaries paid on a scale of the bosses. This is fair game throughout academia with superintendents making several hundred thousand dollars to run middling school districts, all the while the real workhorses remain underpaid. The same goes on at the universities that rely on models of indentured servitude with adjuncts and TAs doing the heavy lifting to mask the organized life of leisure of many academic divas.
The reality is that the biggest activity of those CEO is to raise endless supplies of money, and that their skills are compensated on that basis.
Bottom line? Those salaries are most often obscene and hardly justifiable to anyone with an ounce of common sense. They got those salaries --and massive benefits that are often buried-- because they could get away with it through insider’s shenanigans.
And this for way too long! Some day all this nonsense will come to a halt but it might take a 500,000 undergraduate cost to realize how out of control the world of education has become.
Of course, they do – courtesy of a limited requirements in teaching duties! How many of those fellows do you think might be serving the students in the next 3 months?
I would agree with you if you were right, but you are wrong so I won’t.
After a company goes public, that is no where near their biggest activity.
Their biggest activity is managing the revenue, costs, health and growth of the company.
Do you think Tim Cook is out there raising money all the time? Uh. No.
Remember, if a stock in a company goes down, it does not impact the money that the company has.
A college President on the other hand is constantly raising money working with alumni, working with the State or other agencies on grants, etc. Even in this article, he specifically mentioned in the third paragraph that he is doing this in order to make it easier to work with the Texas legislature.
Huh? U of T Austin has about 50,000 students, 25,000 staff - and the President has to make sure that those stakeholders are in line. If an employee leaves, the company hires someone else, or has existing employees do the work. If a student leaves, the college has just lost money - both immediate as well as possible future alumni donations.
If you don’t think a college President doesn’t have quarterly checks from the board of Trustees, you are kidding yourself.
Most will be teaching 2+2 and doing some other academic duties–supervising PhDs etc.
Base course loads vary between institutions. Some community colleges have course loads as high as 5/5, and teachers can have as many as 50 students a class. Some research institutions, like mine, have a 3/3, and I teach typically around 100 student a term, with no TA or grader. Some research institutions are 2/1, with grad courses with low enrollment and even TAs or graders. Some liberal arts colleges have a 2/2 load, which compares with some research institutions that supervise Ph. D and masters students, and have low class enrollment.
I also have no idea what counts as ‘teaching’ duties. Certainly class time, and well as prep and grading. But when a student comes by and wants to talk, even if it’s not about academic issues, I don’t shoo him/her away. That, I would assume, would be part of mentorship. And then, especially for first years, when you teach small classes, the students feel comfortable coming to talk to you, and then you get a whole host of issues that I never expected I would be dealing with: kids whose parents have thrown them out of the house, kids who are depressed, kids who want to change majors but don’t want to tell their parents, etc. etc.
Would it have helped if I added Cliff’s notes and made it clearer that the “CEOs” in my line “The reality is that the biggest activity of those CEO is to raise endless supplies of money, and that their skills are compensated on that basis.” were the same described in the quoted text box?
To be clear, my sentence referred to “CEOs” of academic institutions and not the real CEOs. I thought the context of my post would have made that clear. IHTH!
And, if you believe that the reporting requirement of an institution such as the University of Texas are similar to the ones of a publicly traded company … all I can say is … power to you!
@xiggi The clarification that “CEOs” of colleges need to raise more money all the time makes sense. I don’t equate the title of a CEO with that of a college President, and since it was about comparing college Presidents to a CEO, it seemed that you meant CEO of companies.
Reporting to the Board is not similar to a publicly traded company. They are different with different measures and goals, but they both have issues that they are evaluated on - it isn’t just the public CEO
^^
I did not coin that term. My post was in response to "“These people are the CEOs of major institutions. What do you expect them to earn?” and I quoted the term. Again, I thought it was pretty clear from my post that I do not think such a title was appropriate nor relevant. I should have added "purported CEOs’ …
Some of the salary figures quoted in posts above are misleading, if not just wrong. The “average salary” of “Professors,” is not the same thing as the average salary of the tenure stream faculty as a whole (assistant professors, associate professors, and (full) professors). Nor is it the average salary of tenured professors (which basically is associate and full professors). Nor is it the average salary of the teaching faculty as a whole, which includes a whole not of adjunct professors and instructors who are not in the “tenure stream.”
I’m not going to try to fish such data out. I just to say WATCH out.
Industry Market forces also impact salaries. For example, salaries in your School of Accounting are likely much higher than in the School of Agricultural and Life Sciences. And if you have a College of Medicine…$$$.
The salary figures I quoted are correct. It comes directly from the U of T/Austin website.
They break out salaries in 4 categories for each department, and the data I used was for “Professors” and I gave the same salaries and number of people in each category. I did not say that these were the salaries of the “Tenure Stream Faculty” (which they don’t even directly summarize) or the “WHOLE” department. I specifically used their data and their labels.
So no need to WATCH out.
LOL.
Yeah, but colleges are non-profits. While I expect a college president’s compensation to be commensurate with the role’s responsibilities, it’s magnitude needs to be balanced with “optics”.
Most are well below the pay of top corp execs, doctors and lawyers.
@GMTplus7 …this reminds me of those news reports about the crazy salaries being pulled in by some non-profits and NGO’s.
“Not so nonprofit: 34 top charity execs earn $1 million or more”
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-non-profit-salaries-20130924-story.html
Talk about bad “optics”…
The tax status of an organization has NOTHING to do with what they decide to pay their employees, so it isn’t even an optics issue as it relates to their tax filing status.
Now, it may be optics for parents who wonder, “why am I paying so much tuition when the President of the college gets paid so much?” But if they also paid $250k (4 year full cost of a college) for a Ferrari, I doubt they would ask why the President of Ferrari gets paid so much.
FYI, the commissioner of the non-profit NFL got $120M in his first seven years.
@gator88ne The Boy Scouts has about 1M members and is the 7th most popular charity/non-profit in America, so if by “crazy salary” you mean that a $391k salary is way too little, then I agree.