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Are CEOs Overpaid? Not Compared With College Presidents (cbsnews.com)
schwit1 writes: For outrageous executive earnings, don't look to Wall Street -- look to academia. High pay for CEOs attracts annual attention and recitations about the immorality of capitalism, but when the focus is on average CEO pay, they make less than half the annual earnings of college presidents, according to CBS News. The average CEO earns $176,840 annually, an amount that would make a university president into a pauper. In academia, college presidents earn $377,261 annually. Americans outraged and indebted by high college costs will be quick to draw the parallel between a college president's pay and their tuition bill. Correlation, though, doesn't imply causation. College presidents aren't always the highest-paid college employees -- athletic coaches often earn more. Regardless, college presidents "are well into the 99th percentile of compensation for wage earners in the United States," Peter L. Hinrichs and Anne Chen noted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
If they fuck up really bad do they still get the golden parachute?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The other employees oversee each other. There are accountants and various other administrative positions responsible for that.
The president oversees maybe 5 people or so.
And No. They don't oversee the students. The professors do that. Who oversees the professors? The dean, perhaps.
The system is structured in such a way that no person oversees more than a handful of other persons. It would be too much work, otherwise, and so they create another position and offload the work onto them. Nobody should be paid more just because they happen to be 'on top' of the tree-like structure.
In fact, it's the other way around. The people at the bottom should probably be paid the most, because they're the ones that are actually essential to the whole operation. Take some administrative staff away, and the university still functions for its intended purpose. Hell, take ALL of the administration away and it still functions! What happens if you take away the professors and lecturers, though? Dead university. The lecturers and professors should be paid most highly.
A major uni in my state paid their "VP of Diversity" $180K (before benefits).
This is 3 to 4 times more than a starting Ph.D. at the same uni.
A Ph.D. (with a full professorship) retired from this uni was was making $70 after 30 years of teaching.
The Government school teachers in my county and state earn more than other college/uni graduates make but the school teachers get summers off.
Education has turned into a Great financial deal for so-called "educators".
Education has turned into a Great scam for taxpayers.
A few of the big name schools make money from their football programs, most lose money.
Most lose money on the football program itself, but it still pays for itself or even brings in a lot of money through *donations* that they are able to encourage because people respond irrationally to football.