Asking Whether Presidents Are Overpaid Is the Wrong Question

N

1

College Presidents; Adjunct Faculty; Salaries; Compensation (Remuneration); Job Analysis; Comparable Worth; Higher Education

0009-5982

While some presidents are almost as overpaid as their basketball coaches, most campus administrators are not. Instead they work hard at complex and demanding positions and are often paid less than managers with comparable responsibilities in other lines of work. Assessments of compensation typically invoke criteria of fairness and performance. Fairness is a relational concept. Presidents make claims of fairness about their compensation by pointing to what other presidents are paid at highly ranked competitor institutions. They complain about the high cost of living in the region, or they note that education administrators have historically been less well paid than similarly talented executives in other fields. Those arguments succeed to the point that they tap into widely accepted values. The arguments break down, however, when presidents resist applying those same values to everyone else on the campus. Using one form or another of peer comparison, many administrators can easily show that they should earn 20 or 30 percent more than their current salary. But that relatively modest underpayment pales beside the perennial exploitation of adjunct faculty members. In this article, the author contends that the issue is less whether most college presidents are overpaid than whether faculty and staff members are underpaid.

ERIC

2009

EJ822519