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.