Dive Brief:
- The 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents had dramatic increases in executive pay after 2008, along with above-average increases in student debt and the use of part-time adjunct professors, according to a study.
- Average executive pay at the same group of 25 schools rose to almost $1 million per year in 2012, climbing more than twice as fast as the national average for public research universities.
- The number of part-time adjunct faculty at these universities increased more than two times as fast as the U.S. average for all universities.
Dive Insight:
The basic accusation leveled by the report by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies is that the presidents of state schools are getting rich on the backs of debt-ridden students and poverty-stricken adjuncts. And it’s not so thinly veiled; it’s in the title of the study: “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor.”
But one of the study’s authors, Marjorie Wood, tells the New York Times that the point isn’t a direct connection between executive pay and student debt or cuts in spending on professors; the point is that top-heavy executive spending is a tip-of-the-iceberg indicator of how a university is allocating its resources. According to the report, the state schools with the highest-paid presidents had administrative spending that more than doubled scholarship spending. Also at those schools, the percentage of permanent faculty dropped significantly, and by fall 2012 they had more part-time and contingent faculty than permanent faculty for the first time.