Gutmann has been doing a phenomenal job. Penn has lucked out in that it has had its two best presidents back to back (Rodin then Gutman). It will be hard to find a worthy successor when the time comes.
UPenn is performing right around where you’d expect, right? On a per student basis, the school is raising about as much as Cornell and Columbia (two other similarly sized schools).
The best over-performers on the list seem to be Duke and Yale - smaller schools that are still raising a ton of money.
And, Harvard and Stanford seem to be pulling out of sight. Stanford, for instance, is significantly smaller than Penn, but raises almost TWICE as much money.
So, a honest question: why is Gutmann getting paid so much more than the presidents at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, MIT, etc.? If fundraising is a big part of the job, she’s doing well, but there are clearly schools doing better, and some much better on a per student basis.
Also, Penn has plateaued in most rankings - in US News undergrad, law, engineering, medicine, etc., I don’t think it’s higher now than ever. In fact, for some rankings (like the college rankings) it’s noticeably lower than it was during some of Rodin and Gutmann’s peak years.
To sum, it seems to be where it was about 10 years ago - not at the very tippy top. And, those at the very tippy top seem to separating more from the pack.
@Cue7 why focus on a per student basis? Why is the student body size so important? After all the majority of the total fundraising is not coming from alumni at any of these schools.
Regarding why she is making more I d say it is because she has consistently delivered above and beyond for 14 years now. The annual fundraising performance barely scratches the surface in terms of her performance. Just off the top of my head I can think of several things:
- She lead the largest capital campaign in Penn history
- Secured a $200+ million donation for the medical school
- Launched the PIK professors program through which Penn has “poached” top professors from many other elite universities.
- Started the all-grant no loan FA policy
- Her Penn Compact has integrated the different schools and strengths of the university much more and has sparked a lot of innovation. Penn is the pioneer and leader in gene therapy, for example.
- Her Penn Connects initiative has transformed the campus, adding numerous new buildings, including the construction of the Pennovation Center, the Nanotechnology building, Poli Sci &Econ building among many others.
I don’t think any of the other presidents have had such a long and profound impact on their schools.
Ranking changes are pretty hard to achieve if you are near the top, which Penn is. For some fields Penn is in the tippy top tier, formany other fields it is near the top.
I wouldn’t say that a #8 spot on the USNews college rankings is noticeably lower than the #4-5 spot it maintained a decade ago. Such small changes are of no practical importance at his level. Once you enter the top 10 it doesn’t matter. HYPSM are always gonna be the tippy top in terms of overall prestige unless something seismic happens. As for Harvard and Stanford, well these two are the undisputed top dogs of higher ed, they are just on a different level by pretty much all metrics. And that is fine. Overall, Penn might not be at the very top but it has maintained a place near the top, which is rather impressive I d say.
@Penn95 - you point to Gutmann’s successes at Penn, but the point isn’t to look at her successes in isolation. What have other schools been doing?
From what I can see, schools now seem to be churning really hard to stay in about the same place. If you look at UPenn’s standing now, does it really look that different than 10 years ago?
Why should Gutmann’s pay exceed what you see at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, etc. if the most impressive thing you can say is that the U has “maintained” a place near the top? Shouldn’t improvement be what’s most heavily coveted, not maintenance?
Why is Gutmann’s pay 2X more than some of these other presidents? That to me implies that she’s doing something that you can’t find elsewhere but, at best, she’s just been maintaining the status quo.
You name lots of initiatives at Penn, but all major schools have a host of initiatives and major building campaigns ongoing (Harvard is in a $8B campaign w lots of building planned, Stanford just finished a huge campaign, Columbia is looking to build a new campus, lots of new spaces, etc.).
Finally, re looking at fundraising from a per student basis - I think the correlation between size and amount raised should be discussed. What’s more impressive to you - to be a school that raises $600M (like, say, Yale), or to be a school that is literally 80% larger that raised $626M? If you were to assess fundraising, who would you say did better? I think it’s much more impressive for the significantly smaller school to raise $600M, as opposed to the much more massive school raising just $26M more.
@Penn95 Re fundraising, i disagree that a smaller student body size makes the fundraising effort more impressive, it dont see why it does. It might mean that the money will go further because of the smaller student body, but even that depends on how you manage it. However, looking at how fundraising works, it is clear that having a bigger student body size doesn’t make it any easier to raise big sums. If anything I find Penn’s fundraising performance much more impressive than Yale’s given that Yale has a stronger brand and the best CIO out there, which both should actually make it quite easier to attract big-time donations.
re maintaining the status quo, I think she is doing anything but that. My comment about maintaining was regarding Penn’s overall perceived prestige, which as I mentioned, is extremely difficult to change noticeably when you are near the very top. The next step for Penn would be to be considered as prestigious as HYPSM, which is an extremely hard ceiling to crack even if real progress is being made. As I said, something seismic would need to happen in order for Penn or any other non-HYPSM elite school to achieve that.
In the meantime, her accomplishments do show that Penn has been improving a lot. In terms of innovation and entrepreneurship Penn is also been steadily improving and is close to the very top. Penn this year was the pioneer for the biggest cancer breakthrough in recent times. It was also the pioneer for the first gene therapy treatment approved in the US. It recruited Biden and just opened a brand new policy center in DC. Number of apps are consistently increasing, yield has increased since she took office, financial aid budget is increasing every year, endowment is the 5th biggest after HYPSM and has performed extremely well in the past 10 years (Ammon was appointed by Gutman and is a Swensen protege). The campus has been completely transformed, in a scale much larger than at any of the other schools which have similar resources. Yes Harvard has bought up all of Allston, but it also has over 3x the endowment that Penn has. PIK has recruited some of the worlds top scholars from places like Harvard, Duke, NU amongst others.
Any way you slice it Penn has been making real progress and most of it is due to her leadership. All schools have a host of initiatives but if you look closely no other president of peer schools have had the kind of comprehensive and long-term impact Gutmann has had on Penn . There hasn’t been a president that has done so much with comparable resources. I think the amount and impact of what she has done given the resources available is something unique and worth her salary. She is extremely well-regarded in higher ed and fundraising circles for her work at Penn. Besides, I dont think the Board of Trustees are not smart enough to be paying her what she deserves. Most of her compensation is tied to milestones which she clearly hits.
Rodin was an incredibly difficult act to follow by any standards. I don’t think there has been a more effective college president in recent memory. But Gutmann has held her own and done some really amazing things.
^6th largest endowment lol forgot how to count. Also the Penn Wharton China Center has been another major initiative by Gutmann. I am just a huge Amy fan haha, i don’t know if you can tell…
Fundraising is her primary job, and she’s done a bang job at that. Whereas schools like Dartmouth have been reeling at their president and his decisions, Gutmann is almost universally liked by Penn alums given her accomplishmests, so her pay is justified. I haven’t seen much, if any criticism internally among Penn students/faculty/alums that she is being overpaid.
@Penn95 - I’m not asking if UPenn is better now than 10 years ago. It clearly is. So are almost all the major urban schools - schools that have all followed the Rodin - not Gutmann - playbook, btw.
I’m asking if Penn’s standing now is better than it was 10 years ago. If the standing has improved, that’s where the real compensation should come in.
@aoeuidhtns - Yes, she’s done well fundraising, but haven’t almost all the other major urban research universities? I would say the presidents at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, UPenn, Hopkins, Northwestern, Chicago, Yale, Duke, etc. should all have fairly comparable compensation - with maybe H and S paying more because their schools are separating so much from the pack.
Instead, I think Gutman is the highest paid - getting considerably more than her peers at Yale, Duke, Harvard, etc.
Why, if all these schools are doing a bang up job at fundraising (and they have), and Penn’s standing is virtually the same as ten years ago, is all this pay coming in for her?
@Cue7 But I am arguing that the standing cannot realistically improve much further in tangible terms. Penn is considered one of the 4-5 schools that are a notch below HYPSM. While real changes and improvements are happening, getting to the next tier is almost impossible, you would need something seismic to happen as i said. No marketing campaign, clever admissions strategy, climbing rankings etc can achieve that. One way for Penn to get to the next level would be to take advantage of its status as the pioneer in gene therapy and immuno-oncology, somehow build a biotech ecosystem that can rival Boston and SF and then have amazon pick Philadelphia for its HQ2 and harness Amazons presence for more breakthroughs and national/international exposure. Something of this scale needs to happen organically in order for Penns standing to increase substantially. This would be similar to what propelled Stanford to be Harvard’s rival nowadays and surpass Yale and Princeton. At the level Penn is at, maintaining its spot is a very hard and demanding job that i think Gutmann has been doing very well.
Regarding why she gets paid more, I think just looking at fundraising means looking at only part of the picture. Yes fundraising is important but what you do with that money is also extremely important. I stand by my assessment that there is no president of a university with similar resources and standing that has done more with the resources available than Gutmann. Bollinger at Columbia is another example that has done a lot and his pay used to actually be higher than Gutmann’s a few years back but it has decreased in recent years.
@Penn95 - really, you think Penn has done more with the money it’s raised in comparison to other top urban schools? I don’t think UPenn has done more than Columbia, Chicago, Hopkins, Northwestern, and certainly not Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, with the money it’s raised. Further, it hasn’t proven much more successful than Columbia, Hopkins, (and the tippy top) for fundraising prowess.
You look at any of the roughly top ten research Us, and they are all doing a tremendous amount of building, of core investment, and of fundraising. If you look at where Penn comes out in almost any metric here - it’s firmly in the bottom half of the top 10-12 schools.
So, why is Penn paying absolute top dollar for bottom half of the top 10-12 performance? The school that should be lavishing the most pay on its president is Stanford, than maybe Harvard and USC (bc USC is punching so far above their weight here).
Instead, Gutmann’s pay eclipses everyone’s - including Bollinger at Columbia, and he’s done just as well, if not better. (The pay that comes close is Chicago’s president, and I have questions about that, too, but that’s for another thread.)
Why?
Absolutely disagree. I do think Penn has done more with the money it has raised and its existing endowment than other schools, especially Harvard, Stanford, Yale ( and even more so Yale) which are all tremendously richer schools than Penn. In terms of campus building this is definitely true and easy to see when comparing Penn to the schools with similar resources (i.e. leaving HS out). If you go to the Penn facilities website and compare the scale of building and renovations, Penn’s is much more extensive and comprehensive. Some goes for all he other initiatives I outlined above. I haven’t seen a school with comparable resources that has done so much in so many different fronts over the last couple decades.
Penn does not come out in on the bottom half of the 10-12 by almost any metric regarding new initiatives, tangible impact etc, far from it if you adjust for the resources and standing of the school. Also Bollinger has done a lot but has definitely not done better than Gutmann. Even a quick review of their respective wiki pages makes that obvious, and it is confirmed if you dig deeper. The only president that overall has done just as well as Gutmann was probably Hennessy at Stanford. However, Stanford’s strength and standing was and is at a different level than Penn’s to begin with and I also suspect that presidency positions at Harvard and Stanford are not as well paid as at other elite universities because these two are the most prestigious presidential positions there are. There is less need to pay huge salaries to keep top talent from leaving for other universities and top foundations. Schools like Penn has to pay top dollar to retain top talent (Harvard actively tried to recruit Gutmann for president a few years back and also before she became president at Penn).
As i said before I think Penn pays Gutmann significantly more because she has one extraordinary things with the ordinary (by tippy top school standards) recourses and standing that Penn has and has been consistent in doing that for almost 14 years now. Also Penn knows they have struck gold and that Gutmann is so sought-after that she could get a presidential university or top foundation in a heartbeat so they need to keep the incentives going. The board of trustees is comprised of some seriously smart people, I dont really doubt they are overpaying her.
Btw i think you might find this interesting. https://www.phillymag.com/news/2017/02/04/amy-gutmann-penn-trump/
@Penn95 - being in the bottom half of the top 10-12 would, be, well, finishing #6 or #7 (or lower). How did UPenn finish in fundraising according to this article - #7, no? That’s in the bottom half of the top 10 (or 12).
You’re a big Gutmann fan, but let’s look at some numbers - UPenn, Columbia, and UChicago all pay their presidents roughly the same amount - about $3M a year. Meanwhile, Harvard paid out $1.5M, Hopkins $1.3M, Northwestern $1.5M, Stanford $1.2M, Yale $1.1M, Duke $1.2M, Brown $1.1M, and on and on…
You think the UPenn president deserves almost 3X what Duke or Hopkins or Stanford’s presidents make?
Also, Penn’s fundraising has been good, but when you point to endowment growth, the key exec there is the manager of the endowment. That’s who rakes in big bucks for great endowment performance - it has less to do with the president.
I’m not saying Penn isn’t doing well. BUT, we are in the era of thriving urban research Us - and many of them are doing well. To say Penn’s pace is 3X Hopkins’ or Duke’s is silly to me.
Finally, you touch on the most salient point briefly - much of compensation is based on institutional fear. It’s no surprise who the top schools paying the most are - Chicago, UPenn, and Columbia. These schools have had the same leader for quite some time, and these schools are also in the most uncertain positions - knocking on the door of the tippy top, but also competing quite ferociously against each other (and others).
So, the compensation, then, might not purely be a reflection of institutional progress - but, rather, institutional fear.
There’s a difference.
Source: https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensation
The money manager was a Gutmann appointee. All Swensen proteges are hot commodities and super tough to get. Same goes for the dean of admissions who had a very impressive track record at Columbia before coming to Penn. She has been very good at appointing the right people in the right positions. Yes i think the pace of Penn compared to Duke or Hopkins is quite higher in terms of new initiative and progress in multiple different fronts, difficult do quantify how much though. Just as example, look at how many star professors and researchers Penn poached from Duke through the PIK program, it is around 3-4 I think. They even managed to poach 2-3 major stars from Harvard. or the new partnership with novartis that yielded the biggest cancer breakthrough of the last decade or so. This is all Gutmann’s doing.
I get the point about institutional fear, but in order for an institution to have something major to fear they must have something really valuable to lose. And Gutmann is that for Penn. She is by no means perfect but vis a vis her contemporaries she has had the most tangible impact and has done the most given Penn’s resources and standing. I think it is pretty smart of penn to be paying her what they are.
@cue7 “knocking on the door of the tippy top, but also competing quite ferociously against each other (and others).”
I don’t see Penn, Chicago, and Columbia competing for the same student at the undergrad level. I think they are all winning at getting the type of students they target. These three schools pull good numbers of cross-admits from all schools except Harvard and Stanford who enroll a combined 3,400 freshmen. They even draw a decent number of cross-admits from Yale, Princeton, and MIT. I don’t think it can get much better for them.
What I get from this list is that the top schools are all raising vast amounts of money and continue to distance themselves from other schools in multiple ways. I don’t think they have to beat each other. They are all winning here.
As a side note, I am glad to see that Cornell did well. It is a fantastic school.
Of course they don’t compete with each other. They lock in one half to three quarters of their classes through exclusive ED.
Couldn’t agree more. This is as good as it can get for these schools, unless something earth-shattering happens, which is extremely unlikely.
“I don’t see Penn, Chicago, and Columbia competing for the same student at the undergrad level. I think they are all winning at getting the type of students they target.”
I think they increasingly do compete for the same students, even though maybe they shouldn’t because they are quite different. Many of the students who target these kinds of schools look at prestige and strength first and don’t do extensive due-diligence on fit. Especially RD applicants, for whom these three were likely not their first choice. They think “oh, Columbia, Penn, Chicago are all top 10, urban , research universities” and kind of apply to all. Fit usually comes into play if they receive multiple acceptances and even then it is often not the number 1 consideration. It is the same if you think about Harvard vs Yale for example. They are vastly different schools that provide vastly different undergrad experiences yet they do have a big overlap in applicants.