A recent study of salaries at private colleges has defied a number of expectations about executive compensation in the world of higher education.
The findings, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, indicate that presidents are often not the highest-paid college employees. Instead, colleges are increasingly allocating the top dollars to dental and medical school professors.
The study was based on tax records filed for fiscal year 2006 by 600 private colleges and universities and found that only 31 percent of the 293 employees in the data set who earned more than $500,000 per year were the presidents or chancellors of their respective institutions.
But at Tufts, like at many other comparable universities, the president gets the biggest paycheck.
The Daily's analysis of Tufts' Internal Revenue Service paperwork from fiscal year 2006, the most recent forms that are publicly available, shows that University President Lawrence Bacow earned $520,420, plus $52,151 in benefits.
The second-highest-paid employee, at $486,806 with benefits, was Maria Papageorge, who is currently the chair of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the School of Dental Medicine. She also chairs the Department of Dentistry at Tufts Medical Center.
Papageorge's salary underscores a larger nationwide pattern of dental and medical school professors vying with presidents and chancellors for the position of highest-paid employee.
Columbia University's salary structure provides a drastic example of this pattern. During fiscal year 2006, Columbia President Lee Bollinger had a base salary of $911,284, while the five best-compensated professors made at least $1.5 million each. Dermatology Professor David Silvers topped the list at $4.3 million.
The trend is "not terribly surprising, since these things are market driven," Steven Bloom, the assistant director of government relations at the American Council on Education, told the Daily. He noted that in order to stay competitive, universities need to match or exceed their competitors' offers.
Sometimes, however, the highest-paid employee completely defies expectations. At the University of Southern California, the top earnings went to head football coach Pete Carroll, who has a contract worth $4.4 million per year, according to the Chronicle.
Carroll's contract makes him not only the highest-paid coach in all of college football, but also the best-compensated college employee in the entire country.
The impact of salary trends like these is easy to anticipate. "I suspect you'll have some of those other faculty members pushing for more money," Bloom said, referring to professors who see their peers earning substantially more than they do.
At Tufts, the Board of Trustees' compensation committee decides on the salaries of the university's top earners.
These employees' pay rates then make it onto the university's IRS Form 990.This form was the basis for the Chronicle's numbers.
Since public universities are not required to file the same form, they were not included in the Chronicle's analysis.
