The Biggest Campus Paycheck May Not Be the President’s

Think presidents are the top earners in academe? Think again. While college and university presidents lately have been criticized for taking home hefty paychecks, even as the bottom falls out of higher-education budgets, data compiled and analyzed by The Chronicle reveal that they’re generally not their institutions’ best-paid employees.

In fact, a measley 11 out of 88 private-college employees who pocketed $1-million or more in the 2006-7 fiscal year held the top job, The Chronicle’s new report on the compensation of more than 4,000 employees at 600 private four-year colleges found. Those making the biggest bucks were more often than not administrators and professors at medical schools, athletics directors, or coaches.

Pete Carroll, head football coach at the University of Southern California, came in at No. 1, with a combined pay-and-benefits package of $4.4-million — outearning USC’s president, Steven B. Sample, by four to one, as Jeffrey Brainard, a reporter for The Chronicle, notes in his article about the report. David N. Silvers, a dermatologist at Columbia University, placed a close second with $4.3-million.

In fact, 46 medical administrators and professors took home over $1-million, while “11 medical personnel were among the 14 college employees of all job types who earned more than $2-million,” Brainard writes. He notes that even E. Gordon Gee, who was the most-handsomely paid private-college president in 2006-7 when he still led Vanderbilt (he’s since returned to the top post at Ohio State University), “made less than two medical administrators there.” Unlike presidents, though, many medical-school professors “generate much of their own pay, through revenue from seeing patients and from research grants,” Brainard points out.

Still, what rankles many people isn’t so much the size of presidents’ and other top administrators’ paychecks, but rather the enormous and ever-widening pay disparity between them and most faculty members, Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, observes in a New York Times article about The Chronicle report:

“When you have college presidents making $1 million, you’re going to have $800,000 provosts and $500,000 deans,” [he] said. “It may be reasonable for these people to be well paid, but if faculty’s getting 2 percent raises, I don’t see why senior administrators who are already high-paid should get much larger increases. It reflects a set of values that is not the way most Americans think of higher education.”