Three dozen private-college presidents earned more than $1-million in 2012, with the typical leader making close to $400,000, a Chronicle analysis has found.
The millionaire club increased by one from the year before, and the median pay rose by 2.5 percent.
The highest-paid leader was Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ms. Jackson, who has regularly ranked in the top 25, earned just over $7.1-million, up from nearly $1.1-million in 2011. A large portion of her 2012 earnings came from a payout of almost $5.9-million that had been set aside over 10 years as a retention incentive.
No. 2 on the list, John L. Lahey of Quinnipiac University, made close to $3.8-million in 2012. That included about $2.8-million in compensation that had been set aside in previous years.
The top-10 list featured some familiar names, including the highest-paid Ivy League president, Lee C. Bollinger of Columbia University, at nearly $3.4-million, and John E. Sexton of New York University, at just over $1.4-million.
One new entrant in the million-dollar club was Charles R. Middleton, of Roosevelt University. As with many other presidents, the deferred compensation he received in 2012 put his pay into seven figures. Deferred-compensation plans, common for college presidents, are used as a retention tool. Leaders typically forfeit those earnings, which accumulate over a number of years, if they resign before a specified date.
Mr. Middleton made nearly $1.8-million in 2012, which included close to $1.2-million that had been deferred over the previous decade. In 2011 he earned about $515,000.
The chairman of Roosevelt’s Board of Trustees, James J. Mitchell III, said Mr. Middleton had led the transformation of the university from serving primarily older, part-time students to enrolling a majority of undergraduates who are full time and of traditional college age.
Other presidents whose pay topped $1-million, largely because of the payout of deferred compensation, included Robert Weisbuch, of Drew University, and James F. Jones Jr., of Trinity College, in Connecticut. Mr. Weisbuch received about $970,000 in deferred compensation, putting his total compensation at close to $1.2-million in 2012. Mr. Jones was paid almost $677,000 in deferred compensation, putting his total compensation at just over $1.1-million.
The Chronicle’s analysis is based on reviews of IRS Form 990s for 2012 and filings with the U.S. Department of Education. The analysis includes 500 colleges with the largest endowments. Some private nonprofit universities, including Brigham Young University’s campuses in Utah, Idaho, and Hawaii, cite a religious exemption from filing the Form 990 and are therefore excluded. As a result, the data include 537 presidents who served for all or part of the 2012 calendar year at 497 institutions.
The Chronicle changed its methodology this year. Over time we have wrestled with the best way to reflect a president’s compensation, which has many parts and can be counted in different ways.
After collecting feedback from colleges and considering how most people tend to think about pay, we decided this year to no longer include compensation that is categorized on the IRS Form 990 as “deferred compensation.” That money, which is set aside for future years, it at risk of being forfeited if the president does not fulfill the terms of service.
The new method also ensures that the same pot of money isn’t counted in more than one year. For comparison’s sake, we have applied the methodology for 2012 to data from previous years.
The Chronicle analyzes the pay of public-college leaders separately, collecting information through surveys of public research universities and affiliated systems with enrollments of at least 10,000, and universities with smaller enrollments that are state flagships.
Applying the updated methodology to our most recent public-college report, which used data from the 2012 fiscal year, the median pay was close to $392,000. Two surpassed the $1-million mark. A total of 212 chief executives at 191 public universities and systems were included.
Pay in Context
Among private-college leaders, some paychecks stood out not for the total amount but for how much they differed from those of others on the campus.
At Belmont University, Robert Fisher’s base pay in 2012 was more than eight times the average salary of full professors, the greatest gap between a leader and his or her faculty in this year’s analysis. Mr. Fisher’s base pay was just over $819,000, while the average pay for full professors at Belmont in 2011-12 was $97,100, according to data collected by the American Association of University Professors. The president’s total compensation in 2012 was $976,827, placing him 40th on the list over all.
The chairman of Belmont’s Board of Trustees said comparing Mr. Fisher’s salary with that of faculty members is the wrong way to look at compensation. “We don’t look at his income and say, ‘He’s x times more than a faculty member,’ " said Marty Dickens. “We look at what he’s done and what he is trying to do.”
He praised Mr. Fisher for improving enrollment and the budget while staying true to the university’s mission and values. Enrollment at Belmont more than doubled from 2000 to 2012, rising from just under 3,000 to about 7,300. During his presidency, the university’s budget increased from $48-million in 2000 to $122-million in 2012. In 2012, his compensation cost $7,968 for every $1-million of university expenditures, or 0.8 percent of the budget.
The Chronicle’s analysis found that, on average, a private-college president’s salary accounted for about 0.5 percent of his or her institution’s overall budget in 2012.
The president with the greatest percentage of institutional budget devoted to presidential pay was John E. Klein, of Randolph College, in Virginia. He received $29,410 for every $1-million in expenditures, or just over 2.9 percent of the budget.
Next were Debra M. Townsley of William Peace University, whose total pay, $452,887, was close to 2.7 percent of the institution’s budget, and Ms. Jackson, of Rensselaer, whose pay represented just over 1.7 percent of the budget.
The chairwoman of Randolph’s Board of Trustees, Becky Dunn, said Mr. Klein was a strong president. Under his leadership, she wrote in an email, “the college regained substantial enrollment and significantly lowered expenses, while maintaining Randolph’s standard of academic excellence.”
The lowest-paid president relative to budget in 2012 was Drew Gilpin Faust at Harvard University. Ms. Faust, who earned $908,642 and was the 47th-highest-paid over all, earned $225 for every $1-million of expenditures. Harvard had the nation’s highest endowment in 2012, at $30.7-billion.
While many governing boards and presidents are quick to defend presidents’ salaries as justified by the extent of their work, one private-college leader said the size of the paycheck is a “source of some concern.”
The large salaries of college presidents are “increasingly hard to justify,” said William W. Destler, president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, who earned $875,046 in 2012. He puts 30 percent of his pay toward scholarships at the university, he said.
Governing boards often benchmark presidents’ salaries according to their peers’ pay at similar institutions, but the real question they should be asking, Mr. Destler said, is, “What does the compensation need to be to get a person to do a good job?”
The bottom line, he said, is that many colleges could find a better bargain without sacrificing quality.
Clarification: This article originally said that the figures reported for 2012 count only the amount a president received in that year. In some cases, compensation that is counted in our analysis—because it was reported by colleges on the IRS Form 990 in a category other than “deferred compensation”—may actually have been paid out over multiple years. This article has been updated accordingly.
