Executive Pay Hits Campuses, And Students Suffer

According to a report published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 private college Presidents make over $1 million, even as the recession and rising tuition costs are squeezing students and recent alumni dry.

Of those 23, here are the top ten:

1. Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.: $1,598,247
2. Davd Sargent, Suffolk University, Boston: $1,496,593
3. Steadman Upham, University of Tulsa: $1,485,275
4. Richard Meyers, Webster University, St. Louis: $1,429,738
5. Cornelius Kerwin, American University, Washington, D.C.: $1,419,339
6. Lee Bollinger, Columbia University, New York: $1,380,035
7. Donald DeRosa, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California: $1,350,743
8. John Sexton, New York University: $1,297,475
9. Robert Bottoms, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana: $1,296,455
10. Nicholas Zeppos, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee: $1,275,309

Now, while some of those schools are recognizably big schools with large budgets, many of them are relative unknowns. The highest paid President of a private college is Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI has about 7,500 students, including grad students and is located in Troy, NY, an area of the country not exactly known for its high salaries or cost of living. In fact, a lot of the schools on this list are not the schools you'd expect to be shelling out large amounts of cash to their presidents: minus Columbia, the Ivy League is absent.

The real problem is not just that university presidents are being paid so much, it's that the leaders of supposedly nonprofit institutions are consistently getting pay increases which outpace inflation. The Chronicle for Higher Education found that the average pay for private college and university presidents was more than $350 thousand, up 6.5% from 2008--even as the economy is currently in deflation. And these salaries are a relatively new phenomenon: in 2002, there were no million-dollar presidents at all. 

The schools paying these exorbitant salaries are not relying on their endowments to pay their executives, either. Very few schools have a large enough endowment to feel comfortable using it and most never touch their endowment for little things like financial aid or student life or even professor salaries. Instead, they invest the endowment in the hopes of growing it large enough to compete in the dick measuring contest that is higher education endowments these days.

Instead, most schools use tuition as their major source of income--of course, since they can't use the endowment without losing prestige but also "need" to spend a lot of money on things like presidential salary. Tuition keeps rising well above the rate of inflation--and, coincidentally, tuition rates went up 6.5% from 2008, keeping pace with presidential salary inflation.

it doesn't matter that a bunch of people really can't afford tuition increases because they're still willing to pay for them. Why? Because we've now reached a point at which having an undergraduate degree is required for the vast majority of jobs, even as the number of jobs continues to decline.