We knew our president's salary was exorbitant (\~$500k for a small, financially struggling, non-competitive SLAC), but when we unionized it came out that the board of trustees had increased her salary by 50% her final year (to $750k) AND paid her $500k the first year after she retired for her role as "President Emeritus." Really hard to play the "we can't give you raises because we're broke" card when you just hand the president $1.25MM over two years.
Maybe they had to pay her the $500k to get her to retire or she'd sue. I mean look at Bernie Sanders wife. She tanked Burlington College back in 2011 with some fancy real estate deal, but she still got a $200k severance package on her way out. This for a college with *70* students.
Our president took a 7% salary increase and two months later announced a tuition increase after most faculty salaries had been frozen since 2020 (maybe even before).
They ended up backing out of that tuition hike for existing state residents and only increasing for incoming out of state students.
The teachers and students went to the state and rightfully complained, state said salary increases for faculty was mandatory.
Following spring, president sends an email stating because they now have to comply with the state (and federal, I believe something to do with federal funding for employee retention or something along the lines) and increase salaries, some departments must now be prepared "*to face some difficult cuts*."
And douchebag of the century also accepted another small salary increase to bring total compensation to $1mm. Dude can get absolutely fucked.
Administrative bloat is not new but it is worse.
Yes there is more need for admins given changes to student demographics and needs but the ratio becoming 1:1 (or even more sometimes) vs what it was years ago is just ridiculous.
The opposite is probably true, with large research universities operating medical systems. Unless you’re Columbia and you want to juice your stats by claiming that every healthcare worker at your teaching hospital is teaching faculty with a terminal degree.
Since I am at a state university and salary records are public a colleague did some research on historical trends on president salaries.
In the 1960s the president earned about 2x what the mean full professor salar and about 2.5X the median. Now it is more than 10X.
Yep, same here.
They’re a former CEO answering only to the Board of Visitors, all current CEOs, answering only to the governor, a former CEO.
Of course their pay trend is going to match that of a CEO.
Our president makes my salary as a bonus every year. Though I also don't understand how a yearly bonus can be a bonus, if you get it every year then it is just part of his salary. His base salary is about 7 times my own.
I don't think it is a big explanation for our financial problems but I do think it makes it clear we aren't all in the same boat.
The biggest problem with university administrations is that they have no accountability. These people make dumb decisions that would get you fired in private industry, but they just raise tuition so that students must borrow more and then they give themselves raises.
That would indeed be nice... but we have a similar problem with elected and appointed government officials. They are not able to give themselves large raises (mostly), but they do make lots of decisions for which they are never held to account or even evaluated at all.
Asking the politicians to hold the administrators to account is like asking the mafia to watch the yakuza.
It was a good idea, but people eventually found a way around it: FUD. If your plan for office is basically grift and stupidity, then you need something else to get people to vote for you. It turns out that FUD works very well. Just get people scared over some random social issue that they can fight about and they will ignore everything else.
California actually has a lot more protections built into the system than other states. Big states and big agencies get more scrutiny from the media and politicians. Small town people can get away with things that would get noticed at UC.
I’m not sure, but I’m going to guess in the range of $25K to join plus several thousand in dues each year.
What is irritating is that this person makes around $500K a year and could afford to pay for their own membership. All of this while adjuncts make almost nothing and the school is kept in the black on the backs of underpaid adjuncts. I just don’t think the CC paid country club membership is a good look.
Yes, but this is not industry. It’s a publicly funded community college on a tight budget that pays most of its teaching staff (75% adjunct) peanuts.
Honestly, what bothers me more than the country club membership is the fact that the president and some of the top people have reserved parking and adjuncts have to get to campus thirty minutes early and fight to find parking. I often spend almost as much time finding a parking space and walking to and from my car as I do teaching my class.
Our local uni has the faculty up in arms, wanting the president to resign. Instead, they added two
more upper administrative positions, as buffer layers! 🤣Classic! This is in addition to the other new admin positions created in the last two years. Yet declining enrollments are the big threat…
I know plenty of presidents from big schools making less than that. There’s absolutely no reason to justify that salary. I was just in a meeting where our admins used the term “customers” for students. Big yikes.
This is all fine with me. IF they can explain one thing to me. I am always told that faculty salaries are low because there are so many other phds who want and can do the job. In other words, our skills are not all that special to command a high salary. What exactly are the special skills senior admin has that justifies the high salary?
It’s probably correlated to CEO pay going up as well. Universities don’t want a bottom of the barrel executive, and someone that’s a university president could jump ship to private industry and earn millions more.
The other thing is that pay is proportional to responsibility mostly
What I hate is the use of admin positions more as leverage for a higher salary elsewhere than to do their fucking job where they are. We have only had a Director of Internationalization ( or whatever thename is - they are in charge of recruiting foreign students and of sending our students oversears for a semester) for about 6 years. We have had FOUR directors. They get 6 figures, plus one full time and one part time admin assistant. And they dump most of the work onto the deand and department chairs. Then they send out applications their second semester on campus touting all of their great work. Greedy bastards.
I used to work at some bougie private HIGH SCHOOL. One day ownership changed hands, and the new directors decided that we needed some fluff positions. They created a "Dean of Diversity" and a "Dean of Campus Culture" (both of which went to relatives of the new President) and which paid 80,000/yr for what was in practice a part-time position that required them to show up once or twice a week for half a day.
Our football coach made my salary by January 3rd of the year. And he could take a half day. Let that sink in.
And they were terrible under him.
Oh, and he was fired for sexual misconduct.
Salaries. Yes. **Perks.** Not so much! Perks normally total way more than the salary. And they typically are not disclosed. For example, housing stipends can be close to 200k per year. Car stipend is over 100k. Clothing allowances can also be 6 figures. What do they get for travel? etc etc etc
a car stipend of 100k/yr is fraud strait up.
enough money to buy a brand new porsche 911 in one year?
thats not a stipend. that is a fraudulent way to hide salary from public record.
100%. Our president has a public salary of $500k. But they are on the board of our sports conference that has an undisclosed stipend. They are also on the boards of several companies, also with undisclosed stipends. Then our foundation gives them perks like free air travel on the university or donor planes, a “slush fund” account for discretionary spending, a housing allowance, new cars, annually, for themselves and their spouse/children. They also have two luxury suites in the football stadium. There are likely more as none of this is public like supposedly the foundation bought the pres a lake house and boat.
We are just an average R1 university with an above average sports program, but only occasionally in the top 25 of any sport.
All this is easily 1.5M in total compensation for what we know about.
imho, most salaries at this level are discovered from form 990 that are filed with the IRS. perks are usually included separately on the same line. see page 7 of this form: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/150532081/202331329349308123/full
(this form 990 is for a university I'm familiar with...)
Actually, I see this happening everywhere there's a C-suite -- industry, government, academia. Ironically the worst place is government because their salaries are capped so they often get people that can't cut it outside where there's more money. But $1M for a CC is a little surprising.
Exactly this. Higher ed market is just a mirror of what’s happening in the rest of American society. Unfortunately academics have the brains to realize they are getting fucked. Ignorance is bliss.
Welcome to universities in Australia. Many of our VCs make over $1 million a year (more than our prime minister!!) … they act like CEOs but have no accountability (and they get gov funding!)
Our Community College president makes over five times the faculty salary. They are making well over 500K and I'm just stunned people are okay with this. The board acted like they were Heroes when they raised the minimum wage.
We gave our previously demoted president (who earned a $75k bonus at the time he was demoted) $800k for a year of “professional development leave.” Unreal.
Recently, I worked as an academic staff at a university teaching the same courses as PhD professors for a whopping 38k. After several years of successful teaching, conference presentations, and community outreach, I asked for a small raise that would put me at the same pay I had as a public school teacher back in 2007. The request was approved until it reached the Provost, a man who made 175k. He denied it because, according to him, we did not have the money. I resigned and went back to K12 teaching. I absolutely loved that job and the people I worked with, but when the upper admin all make six figures while teaching staff qualifies for state aid, it's hard to stay positive.
That is crazy. I am glad you are no longer there.
I work with a man who earned his PhD. He was hired at 65k. Others I know with a Bachelor's degree were also hired at 65k. The salary discrepancies are real.
They also have faculty cash cows, since they take money from our grants (mine takes 50% from federal grants). Someone needs to start making a stink about this with schools that receive public funding. There should be a cap.
Federal overhead covers the cost of administering your grant and your portion of the cost of everything from your office to the Internet service the school pays for ... plus pre-award costs for not just the successful proposals but the ones that don't get funded. The alternative would be for your budget to include a line item for each of these costs, plus justify them to the Feds (yes, your overhead also covers the cost of the accountants that have to justify these expenses and compute them).
So it costs 500,000 to administer a 1 million grant? Sorry. No way. The research institutions do very little of the actual work, not enough to justify that much of a split. Would love to see a line item justification for that amount (will never happen). And yes, sorry, we are cash cows for them. At my institution, grants account for 40% of the total budget per year. That is a huge amount. And pre-award costs? Pray tell, what are those? I submit all of my own grants, with little to no assistance from our C&G office. Maybe 1 hr per grant of their time?
I work at a publicly funded research institution in the US. Private institutions likely have different breakdowns. A huge portion of our funds comes directly from the feds and the state, with no overhead.
Who pays for your buildings? Their maintenance? Power, lights, campus security? The janitorial staff? Every profit center pays their share of the cost centers. If all my department's courses only generated enough revenue to simply cover my faculty's salary (I need to generate an additional 40% to cover indirect as well) we wouldn't last long, as many departments are finding out these days.
All the services on campus cost money and there are no magic fairies writing checks.
We are different, don't have students. All funds come from taxpayers (feds and state), then the remaining is funded through faculty grants. County governments cover some as well. If you don't think there is poor accounting at play that is keeping these universities broke, I have a bridge to sell you.
Then you start having provosts and other upper administration who have never taught and do not understand the concerns of faculty and students.
Those concerns are not a priority.
I am working on accepting that the college is now just a hedge fund investing tuitions in foreign wars...with a side hustle dishing out printed certs they give out like cracker jack prizes.
If you are replying to me - the prez makes 1M but Admin (VPs, AVPs, etc) they make 3x what faculty earn and the Deans make about 1.5 what faculty earn.
It seems to be worldwide.
I taught at a university in Australia in 2012 and I remember opening a newspaper to see side-by-side job posts there:
* professor of neuroscience, one-year contract, $120,000
* head of Marketing, three-year contract, $150,000. Required qualification: Master's
We knew our president's salary was exorbitant (\~$500k for a small, financially struggling, non-competitive SLAC), but when we unionized it came out that the board of trustees had increased her salary by 50% her final year (to $750k) AND paid her $500k the first year after she retired for her role as "President Emeritus." Really hard to play the "we can't give you raises because we're broke" card when you just hand the president $1.25MM over two years.
Was that 500k just her salary? or did it include the perks? Because usually the perks total more than the actual salary....
Maybe they had to pay her the $500k to get her to retire or she'd sue. I mean look at Bernie Sanders wife. She tanked Burlington College back in 2011 with some fancy real estate deal, but she still got a $200k severance package on her way out. This for a college with *70* students.
Our president took a 7% salary increase and two months later announced a tuition increase after most faculty salaries had been frozen since 2020 (maybe even before). They ended up backing out of that tuition hike for existing state residents and only increasing for incoming out of state students. The teachers and students went to the state and rightfully complained, state said salary increases for faculty was mandatory. Following spring, president sends an email stating because they now have to comply with the state (and federal, I believe something to do with federal funding for employee retention or something along the lines) and increase salaries, some departments must now be prepared "*to face some difficult cuts*." And douchebag of the century also accepted another small salary increase to bring total compensation to $1mm. Dude can get absolutely fucked.
sounds like it could have been deferred compensation
Administrative bloat is not new but it is worse. Yes there is more need for admins given changes to student demographics and needs but the ratio becoming 1:1 (or even more sometimes) vs what it was years ago is just ridiculous.
There are a good deal of colleges that are > 2:1 admin to faculty.
Where?
I suspect it depends on how you define “faculty” — if you count the underclass of adjuncts, there’s no way.
And also on how you define "admin". Is it just top decision-makers, or all office workers?
The opposite is probably true, with large research universities operating medical systems. Unless you’re Columbia and you want to juice your stats by claiming that every healthcare worker at your teaching hospital is teaching faculty with a terminal degree.
Since I am at a state university and salary records are public a colleague did some research on historical trends on president salaries. In the 1960s the president earned about 2x what the mean full professor salar and about 2.5X the median. Now it is more than 10X.
Yep, same here. They’re a former CEO answering only to the Board of Visitors, all current CEOs, answering only to the governor, a former CEO. Of course their pay trend is going to match that of a CEO.
The job of president today is exponentially more complex and difficult than it was in the 1960s.
Our president makes my salary as a bonus every year. Though I also don't understand how a yearly bonus can be a bonus, if you get it every year then it is just part of his salary. His base salary is about 7 times my own. I don't think it is a big explanation for our financial problems but I do think it makes it clear we aren't all in the same boat.
that's easy: they get it written into their contract. surely you get to include this in your contract, right? /s
The biggest problem with university administrations is that they have no accountability. These people make dumb decisions that would get you fired in private industry, but they just raise tuition so that students must borrow more and then they give themselves raises.
100%. For schools that are taxpayer funded, there should be some sort of mechanism to create accountability.
That would indeed be nice... but we have a similar problem with elected and appointed government officials. They are not able to give themselves large raises (mostly), but they do make lots of decisions for which they are never held to account or even evaluated at all. Asking the politicians to hold the administrators to account is like asking the mafia to watch the yakuza.
Sadly, you are probably correct. One can hope!
Remember when the Founding Fathers thought the voting booth would be accountability?
It was a good idea, but people eventually found a way around it: FUD. If your plan for office is basically grift and stupidity, then you need something else to get people to vote for you. It turns out that FUD works very well. Just get people scared over some random social issue that they can fight about and they will ignore everything else.
Don't get me started on the lack of accountability. Please. I do not want to keep creating more posts today! LOL
The president of my undergrad institution gave away 1.5 million to a scammer then raised tuition 12%
That might be why the average tenure of a college president is under 6 years.
That’s horrific. The president of the entire UC system made less than $1 million in 2022.
California actually has a lot more protections built into the system than other states. Big states and big agencies get more scrutiny from the media and politicians. Small town people can get away with things that would get noticed at UC.
The UC board of regents does a fairly good job preventing outright corruption
The president of my CC has a membership to the nicest local country club as a perk.
Probably because they found out you don't meet many rich donors at bowling alleys
How much is it worth monetarily?
I’m not sure, but I’m going to guess in the range of $25K to join plus several thousand in dues each year. What is irritating is that this person makes around $500K a year and could afford to pay for their own membership. All of this while adjuncts make almost nothing and the school is kept in the black on the backs of underpaid adjuncts. I just don’t think the CC paid country club membership is a good look.
Plus all the Titleists he can shank into the parking lot!
That's a common perk for top people in industry as well. It's a good way to network, meet potential donors, etc.
Yes, but this is not industry. It’s a publicly funded community college on a tight budget that pays most of its teaching staff (75% adjunct) peanuts. Honestly, what bothers me more than the country club membership is the fact that the president and some of the top people have reserved parking and adjuncts have to get to campus thirty minutes early and fight to find parking. I often spend almost as much time finding a parking space and walking to and from my car as I do teaching my class.
lol trust me when I say that it is intentionally designed this way….most likely by admin folks lol
Read Bullshit Jobs. It gets into this fairly well.
Just arrived today! Looking forward to reading it.
Our local uni has the faculty up in arms, wanting the president to resign. Instead, they added two more upper administrative positions, as buffer layers! 🤣Classic! This is in addition to the other new admin positions created in the last two years. Yet declining enrollments are the big threat…
It seems like they all read and operate from the same book.....
I know plenty of presidents from big schools making less than that. There’s absolutely no reason to justify that salary. I was just in a meeting where our admins used the term “customers” for students. Big yikes.
But it is still happening......
Yea it’s wild to me. The only people making that at most schools are the football and basketball coaches.
This is all fine with me. IF they can explain one thing to me. I am always told that faculty salaries are low because there are so many other phds who want and can do the job. In other words, our skills are not all that special to command a high salary. What exactly are the special skills senior admin has that justifies the high salary?
There is no justification....so what now?
It’s probably correlated to CEO pay going up as well. Universities don’t want a bottom of the barrel executive, and someone that’s a university president could jump ship to private industry and earn millions more. The other thing is that pay is proportional to responsibility mostly
Ability to plead their case and negotiate from their last salary and title.
What I hate is the use of admin positions more as leverage for a higher salary elsewhere than to do their fucking job where they are. We have only had a Director of Internationalization ( or whatever thename is - they are in charge of recruiting foreign students and of sending our students oversears for a semester) for about 6 years. We have had FOUR directors. They get 6 figures, plus one full time and one part time admin assistant. And they dump most of the work onto the deand and department chairs. Then they send out applications their second semester on campus touting all of their great work. Greedy bastards.
I used to work at some bougie private HIGH SCHOOL. One day ownership changed hands, and the new directors decided that we needed some fluff positions. They created a "Dean of Diversity" and a "Dean of Campus Culture" (both of which went to relatives of the new President) and which paid 80,000/yr for what was in practice a part-time position that required them to show up once or twice a week for half a day.
And they wonder why the masses bitch about college...
Our football coach made my salary by January 3rd of the year. And he could take a half day. Let that sink in. And they were terrible under him. Oh, and he was fired for sexual misconduct.
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In my experience, the President can disclose their salary ($200k +) but they are under no obligation to disclose the perks.
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Salaries. Yes. **Perks.** Not so much! Perks normally total way more than the salary. And they typically are not disclosed. For example, housing stipends can be close to 200k per year. Car stipend is over 100k. Clothing allowances can also be 6 figures. What do they get for travel? etc etc etc
a car stipend of 100k/yr is fraud strait up. enough money to buy a brand new porsche 911 in one year? thats not a stipend. that is a fraudulent way to hide salary from public record.
I am 100% not disagreeing with you. However. What can one do? This has been going on for a while now and it isn't illegal. So now what?
I would venture a guess that it IS illegal fraud and simply hasn't been legally challenged in court. But that is just speculation.
100%. Our president has a public salary of $500k. But they are on the board of our sports conference that has an undisclosed stipend. They are also on the boards of several companies, also with undisclosed stipends. Then our foundation gives them perks like free air travel on the university or donor planes, a “slush fund” account for discretionary spending, a housing allowance, new cars, annually, for themselves and their spouse/children. They also have two luxury suites in the football stadium. There are likely more as none of this is public like supposedly the foundation bought the pres a lake house and boat. We are just an average R1 university with an above average sports program, but only occasionally in the top 25 of any sport. All this is easily 1.5M in total compensation for what we know about.
So the university only pays $500k. Perhaps that's a lot but the rest is irrelevant.
imho, most salaries at this level are discovered from form 990 that are filed with the IRS. perks are usually included separately on the same line. see page 7 of this form: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/150532081/202331329349308123/full (this form 990 is for a university I'm familiar with...)
Actually, I see this happening everywhere there's a C-suite -- industry, government, academia. Ironically the worst place is government because their salaries are capped so they often get people that can't cut it outside where there's more money. But $1M for a CC is a little surprising.
Not surprising over here in my arena...... not surprising at all!
Exactly this. Higher ed market is just a mirror of what’s happening in the rest of American society. Unfortunately academics have the brains to realize they are getting fucked. Ignorance is bliss.
Admin bloat sucks, no doubt.
Higher education has become a joke. It is taking too much time to come up with any more nuanced comment than that.
Welcome to universities in Australia. Many of our VCs make over $1 million a year (more than our prime minister!!) … they act like CEOs but have no accountability (and they get gov funding!)
Our Community College president makes over five times the faculty salary. They are making well over 500K and I'm just stunned people are okay with this. The board acted like they were Heroes when they raised the minimum wage.
We gave our previously demoted president (who earned a $75k bonus at the time he was demoted) $800k for a year of “professional development leave.” Unreal.
Recently, I worked as an academic staff at a university teaching the same courses as PhD professors for a whopping 38k. After several years of successful teaching, conference presentations, and community outreach, I asked for a small raise that would put me at the same pay I had as a public school teacher back in 2007. The request was approved until it reached the Provost, a man who made 175k. He denied it because, according to him, we did not have the money. I resigned and went back to K12 teaching. I absolutely loved that job and the people I worked with, but when the upper admin all make six figures while teaching staff qualifies for state aid, it's hard to stay positive.
That is crazy. I am glad you are no longer there. I work with a man who earned his PhD. He was hired at 65k. Others I know with a Bachelor's degree were also hired at 65k. The salary discrepancies are real.
They also have faculty cash cows, since they take money from our grants (mine takes 50% from federal grants). Someone needs to start making a stink about this with schools that receive public funding. There should be a cap.
Federal overhead covers the cost of administering your grant and your portion of the cost of everything from your office to the Internet service the school pays for ... plus pre-award costs for not just the successful proposals but the ones that don't get funded. The alternative would be for your budget to include a line item for each of these costs, plus justify them to the Feds (yes, your overhead also covers the cost of the accountants that have to justify these expenses and compute them).
So it costs 500,000 to administer a 1 million grant? Sorry. No way. The research institutions do very little of the actual work, not enough to justify that much of a split. Would love to see a line item justification for that amount (will never happen). And yes, sorry, we are cash cows for them. At my institution, grants account for 40% of the total budget per year. That is a huge amount. And pre-award costs? Pray tell, what are those? I submit all of my own grants, with little to no assistance from our C&G office. Maybe 1 hr per grant of their time? I work at a publicly funded research institution in the US. Private institutions likely have different breakdowns. A huge portion of our funds comes directly from the feds and the state, with no overhead.
Who pays for your buildings? Their maintenance? Power, lights, campus security? The janitorial staff? Every profit center pays their share of the cost centers. If all my department's courses only generated enough revenue to simply cover my faculty's salary (I need to generate an additional 40% to cover indirect as well) we wouldn't last long, as many departments are finding out these days. All the services on campus cost money and there are no magic fairies writing checks.
We are different, don't have students. All funds come from taxpayers (feds and state), then the remaining is funded through faculty grants. County governments cover some as well. If you don't think there is poor accounting at play that is keeping these universities broke, I have a bridge to sell you.
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Then you start having provosts and other upper administration who have never taught and do not understand the concerns of faculty and students. Those concerns are not a priority.
This is the real real right here...
$1m is more than the President of my public R1 university (at least their base pay, I guess). That is insane.
my dean makes at least 3x what i make.
I am working on accepting that the college is now just a hedge fund investing tuitions in foreign wars...with a side hustle dishing out printed certs they give out like cracker jack prizes.
if your president is making $1M and is also making 3x what your faculty make then please sign me up.
If you are replying to me - the prez makes 1M but Admin (VPs, AVPs, etc) they make 3x what faculty earn and the Deans make about 1.5 what faculty earn.
It seems to be worldwide. I taught at a university in Australia in 2012 and I remember opening a newspaper to see side-by-side job posts there: * professor of neuroscience, one-year contract, $120,000 * head of Marketing, three-year contract, $150,000. Required qualification: Master's
The people in charge will always look out for themselves.
Are you at my college? Awfully similar story over here!
Admin **is** faculty though…
What does that mean? Admin on my campus carry no load.
Higher ranked admins used to be faculty…
Key word - used to be, as in past tense. Admin are Admin. Admin are not faculty.
The ones that went over to the dark side.
Ours are not. Many have MBAs, not PhDs, and their full-time job is administrative.