After more than 30 years in higher education, I can confidently say that no academics working on a college campus — TAs, professors, chairs, deans — feel overpaid. The same is not true about how we assess other people’s salaries, especially those of senior administrators.
Within the faculty, we have a long tradition of personal awkwardness and cultural reticence when it comes to talking about our paychecks. We didn’t get into this business to be rich, we say, before changing the subject (unless it’s about the president’s salary). That attitude carries over when academics move into administration.
I regularly give workshops for aspiring administrators. In the privacy of a small group, most will admit that one of their motivations for moving up the ranks is to earn more money. Of course you can’t say that in the hiring process, at least if you actually want the job:
- Interviewer: “Why do you want to be dean?”
- Candidate: “Because I really want a big pay bump!”
- Interviewer: “Next!”
But some candidates have trouble raising compensation issues even at the point of the hiring process when they should — that is, when it’s time to negotiate the terms of a job offer. In my conversations with would-be administrators, about-to-be administrators, and serving administrators, I’ve found that many are confused, anxious, and even disgruntled about their compensation. But they don’t know which questions to ask, and they fear that even seeking advice about it would make them appear “greedy.”
In the Admin 101 series, I have been writing about this era of administrative turmoil and turnover. I’ve looked at topics including how to find work that matters, win the trust of colleagues, practice pragmatic optimism, and avoid burnout. But certainly a key source of anxiety among leaders is the all-important yet little-discussed topic of salary and other forms of remuneration.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader:
Keep in mind: I’m not talking about higher ed’s super earners here. Presidents already have plenty of expertise at their disposal from accountants, recruiters, and lawyers who specialize in negotiating high-level contracts. So do some deans and provosts at wealthy institutions. Instead, the advice that follows is aimed at the vast majority of academic administrators — chairs, deans, and the ones with “vice” or “associate” in their titles — who don’t have access to expensive compensation experts. In fact, many would-be and first-time leaders have never seen an administrative contract, let alone negotiated one.
When should (and shouldn’t) you talk about money? Early in the hiring process, it’s best to let others bring it up. Every time I’ve been a candidate for a leadership position, the search firm has raised the salary issue in our first conversation. The consultants have either asked me about my salary expectations or provided a pay range for the position. As a candidate, you must be ready to respond candidly.
Consultants bring up the money issue early because a lot of people (especially first-timers) either have no idea about administrative salaries or unrealistic expectations. So it makes sense to clear the air right away so that no one — committees, candidates, search firms — invests a lot of effort with delusional outcomes in mind.
As the process proceeds, however, there will be times when you should not be so blunt about your salary needs. You may be asked about administrative compensation in public gatherings — for example, at dinner with the search committee or even at a town hall with 300 people — and the question may be less than friendly. Skeptics may use a public forum to ask (as has happened to me and other administrators I know) some version of “Don’t you think the salary for this dean’s position is just too high?”
In such moments, I’ve always tried to be honest and say something like, “We all have the right to negotiate the best that we can for our family.” In a leadership job, you will have to defend your institution’s pay system — not just your own salary but everyone else’s — without being defensive in manner or tone. Take the same tack in the hiring process.
In your response to salary questions, be careful, situationally aware, and empathic. As a senior administrator, you will be well paid, or at least paid significantly more than most faculty members. Recognize your own privileged financial status. Saying the wrong thing can come back to haunt you: A professor at a liberal-arts college told me that he never forgave its president for answering a complaint about erratic pay increases for faculty members with the statement “We are all hurting.” No one wants to hear top administrators complain about their salary or pay raises.
As a rule, if you are asked about compensation during a search, don’t pretend that money doesn’t matter. Because nobody will believe you. If the salary range you are given is unacceptable to you, drop out.
Do your compensation homework. So you can’t pester the hiring institution with salary and benefits questions, but you can ask around. Talk with fellow administrators at comparable campuses whose judgment and loyalty you trust.
You need to consider “money and perks” before you take a leadership position, while you’re in one, and when you are seeking a better one. But which issues are most important? And how can you raise and resolve them without hurting your hiring prospects or damaging morale (including your own)?
I’m still idealistic enough to believe that the vast majority of people who enter the professoriate do so for noble intentions. They love research, teaching, and/or service, and want to do them well. They want to help students, science, humanities, the arts, and even the world. It is not hypocritical for those same people to be concerned about making a living, affording a home, sending their own children to college, and being able to retire at some point. The problem is that our “we’re not in it for the money” culture often results in Ph.D.s’ not thinking through basic issues of personal finance.
A few years ago, an administrator who was in the midst of negotiating a job offer contacted me and asked, “What do you think I should get?” He had just been offered the position of dean of sciences at a small liberal-arts college and was scheduled to talk salary with the provost. The figure in the initial offer letter, he told me, “seemed low.” It was, indeed, at the lowest end of the range quoted earlier by the search consultant. And he was anxious, he said, because “I have no one to talk to about this.” Unfortunately, that’s all too common.
I was happy to help, but rather than quote an alternative salary range, my advice was that he do a little research, in the same way that he would on a scholarly question. (The ProPublica database of 990 tax forms is a good place to do some digging.) What could he discover about the salaries of the college’s previous deans? What about the salaries of deans at comparable institutions in the region? He eventually was able to negotiate a higher salary, based not on guesswork but on solid data.
Find mentors or colleagues with whom you can be blunt about money matters. As a new or rising administrator, you should be studying your options well before you have to make a decision on an offer.
There’s more to compensation than salary. For obvious reasons, salary is what most job candidates (and most headlines) fixate on. On the campus, on social media, or in traditional compensation surveys you will hear about a particular amount. But it’s not the whole financial story. Often you have to be a longtime insider to understand the categories and minutiae that add up to a true “total compensation package.” Those under-the-radar details may affect your financial package to an even greater extent than “salary” in the long run.
Depending on the type of administrative post you are seeking, here are some of the “extras” that you may be able to negotiate:
- Temporary housing. Unlike the president, you won’t get an official residence on campus as a chair, dean, or vice provost. But if you’re relocating for the job, you may be able to ask for a short-term housing allowance or even for a space in or near the campus rent-free or at a reduced rate.
- Office set-up. A new dean who was an external hire told me how he’d showed up at his new office and found nothing in it but the equivalent of a TV tray and a lawn chair. The previous dean had apparently furnished the office himself and had taken it all with him. Once you have an offer in hand, figure out what you will need in your new office, such as furniture or computer equipment, and ask for it upfront as part of your hiring package.
- Parking. As the old joke goes, academics will fight over salary but kill over parking. Most administrators are expected to be in the office five days a week, and put in late hours, so parking as close as you can to your office is not just a convenience but a time-saver in service to others. You have the right to ask for some sort of accommodation, either financially or in terms of access to particular spaces.
- Post-administrative life. Anyone who is an administrator today could be out of the position tomorrow. If your eventual career plan after leaving administration is to return to the faculty, think now about what you will need at that point, and get the details (salary, title, lab, teaching obligations) in writing in your contract. Be aware that some states and institutions have rules governing what a former administrator can collect.
People think of such perks as only an option for senior leaders, but they can also be factors in entry-level administrative posts. I know of a private university that brought in an outside hire as a new department head at the same time as it was making several internal promotions as chairs. The outside hire had some retired chairs as friends who advised her on the kinds of perks she might be able to negotiate, beyond salary. And she did: She was able to secure free parking in a space near her office, a cellphone allowance, extra pay for summer teaching, and a host of other small items that resulted in a larger total compensation package for her than for the other new chairs, who had focused on salary alone. Indeed, morale sank when the internal hires found out about her successful negotiations for things they had not considered. (Whether that dean should have made such unequal offers to department chairs is a management mistake for another column.)
I would give the same advice to administrative-job candidates as we do to doctoral students who are negotiating their first faculty-job offer: Find out what’s possible, and politely ask whether it can be done for you. Decide beforehand what you see as a dealbreaker versus a perk you can live without or pay for yourself.
Administrative life can include hidden personal expenses. Just as job candidates aren’t always aware of the positive benefits they can negotiate, so, too, are they often startled by the unexpected debits of a leadership position. It’s unlikely that those costs will prompt you to turn down a promotion or quit, but they should factor into your financial planning.
Take fund raising, which is a major part of many senior administrative posts these days. It’s supposed to be about generating money for your institution, but it can end up costing you dollars from your own pocket. I remember having this discussion at a fund-raising workshop where people talked about all the expenses for which they were never reimbursed. In most cases, your institution will reimburse you for major costs like airfare, hotel, and rental car. But other bills (highway tolls, meal expenses) fall through the cracks.
For example, some institutions (luckily, not mine) will not pay for alcohol for anyone, including guests. Other colleges set a low ceiling for meal reimbursement. Say you are having dinner with a donor who is considering a $1-million gift to your college. The donor orders a glass of wine and a pricey entree, and you pick up the tab. But your college won’t reimburse you fully for what you spent. What seems like a petty consideration can really add up over the years. Some of those expenses may be tax-deductible, but keeping track of them is on you, and some will no doubt get lost.
Other not-so-obvious expenses can also have a wallet-walloping effect on your general cost of living. When you search for articles about leadership compensation in higher education, you don’t see the keywords “suits” or “dry cleaning” come up that much. A new department chair at a business school told me that she had always dressed casually as a faculty member. But the couture expectations of an administrative position were different: She had to dress much more formally (and expensively) for weekly campus functions, and especially for donor meetings. She estimated, as a good professor of finance, that her dry-cleaning bill had risen from negligible to alarming. The same was true for the initial purchase of almost an entire “professional” wardrobe — another major outlay that often goes undiscussed when you move into administration from the faculty.
Housing is even less talked about but has a potentially dealbreaking effect on your cost of living as an administrator, especially at the middle and senior ranks. If your institution is in an expensive area, and you are expected to be in the office routinely and to have evening and weekend commitments, you may end up paying a lot for housing to be close to the campus. A lengthy commute to get a more affordable home will add hours to your already long day, and cut into time with your family.
If at this point, readers are thinking, “Hey, those costs are why administrators get the big bucks,” yes, that’s true. And for the highest-paid leaders, those hidden expenses are a drop in the bucket. But the compensation packages for the average chair, dean, or vice provost aren’t so astronomical that they can afford to ignore the possible financial downsides of the job. When as a leadership candidate you talk with administrators at the rank to which you aspire, don’t just inquire about their salary and benefits. Ask them about the unexpected expenses that come with the job.
“No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson reportedly said. Of course he was probably exaggerating for effect; he loved words and literature, and very likely would not have become an estate manager for a higher salary. I say that because I realize that many of the issues here would certainly be classified by nonadministrators on the campus as “rich people’s problems.”
Nevertheless, higher education needs to attract good people — who are not independently wealthy — to campus administration and keep them moving up the ranks. As a current or future leader, you need to know the pros and cons of this career path for your personal finances, the potential perks and the hidden expenses. It’s entirely legitimate and not avaricious to ponder the financial fallout of the position for you and your family.
