Who Said Education Doesn't Pay Well?
.jpg)
The compensation packages for CEOs of many publicly held companies have recently, (for obvious reasons), come under intense scrutiny. This has spilled over to the chief executive offices of many not-for-profit organizations including private colleges and universities. While the compensation packages for most university presidents and administrators are substantial in many instances, there are a few university employees who sometimes earn substantially more.
According to an article in today’s New York Times, there were 88 private-college employees who made $1 million or more in 2007 (only 11 were college Presidents or chief executive officers). These were the results from an analysis conducted by The Chronicles of Higher Education of the compensation packages of more than 4,000 employees at 600 private colleges. The two top earners were Pete Carroll, the head football coach at USC and Dr. David N. Silvers, a Columbia University dermatologist both of whom made almost $4.5 million last years. Coach Carroll’s compensation packages was almost four times that of the university’s president whereas Dr. Silver’s salary of $4,332,759 compared with $1 411,894 earned by Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president. Another Columbia professor, Dr. Jeffrey W. Moses, earned a paltry $2,532,713 last year. Check out the salaries of the top ten earners!
While the pay for college and university presidents has risen sharply in the last decade the same hasn’t been true for many faculty members. Not surprisingly, over the same period, the gap between administrator and professor salaries has substantially widened. This parallels what has been taking place in the private sector where CEOs typically earn hundreds of times more than their employees. The disparity in administrator and faculty salaries led Patrick M. Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education to muse: “It may be reasonable for these people to be well paid but if faculty’s getting 2 per cent 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 about higher education.” The Chronicle survey found that on average, university and college presidents make about $500,000 annually.
This poses an interesting question: Unlike administrators, are most university and college professors overpaid? Based on my own experience as a medical school faculty member—absolutely not! Nevertheless, over the 10 years or more, there has been a growing disparity in the salaries of research faculty members as compared with teaching faculty. Typically, the researchers, who bring in large sums of money from grants and other extramural funding, command much higher salaries than faculty members whose primary function is teaching. While this may seem reasonable from a financial/business perspective, it raises a fundamental question about higher education: What is more important—making money or teaching?
Until next time…
Good Luck and Good Training!
