Raymond D. Cotton, a Washington attorney and expert on presidential contracts and compensation, says salary competition is being fueled by a wave of retirements by baby boomer college presidents, and by the growing desire of governing boards to hire only presidents who have already been presidents elsewhere.
“What’s happening is there’s an imbalance of supply and demand,” Cotton says.
The competition has driven the average tenure of the president of a large college down to about five years on average — often too short for effective leadership.
“It’s definitely not good to have instability at the top,” Cotton says. Still, most presidents at the nation’s 3,500 colleges and universities earn far less. Other figures from the Chronicle show the average chief executive of a single institution earns a salary of about $181,000. And even the salaries of top college presidents pale in comparison to those of top corporate CEOs.
Cotton says he sees the compensation of private college presidents rising more rapidly than that of their public counterparts, whose schools educate far more students.
“That is troublesome to me,” he says. “That’s to me where we should be emphasizing the quality of the leadership.”
After a long-running dispute over release of the figure, Pennsylvania State University agreed for the first time to provide the Chronicle with salary information for President Graham Spanier. He will be paid $492,000 this year, 25th among the 139 public universities surveyed.
— Associated Press
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