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January 11, 2009

State school chiefs get ‘A’ in salaries

Gone are the days when Pennsylvania’s university presidents faced tight caps.

MARTHA RAFFAELE Associated Press Writer

HARRISBURG — When Pennsylvania’s system of 14 state-owned universities was in its infancy, its top executives took home relatively modest paychecks.

For years, the State System of Higher Education took pains to ensure that no university president was paid more than the governor.

Today, the picture is drastically different.

The lowest-paid president, Maravene Loeschke of Mansfield University, earns $189,195 annually — about $14,000 more than Gov. Ed Rendell. At the top of the scale, Indiana University of Pennsylvania President Tony Atwater receives $253,428 a year.

The current salary range reflects raises averaging 6 percent that the system announced in November for most of the presidents. Officials cited the presidents’ job performance during the 2007-08 academic year and, in the cases of five presidents, a need to keep their pay competitive with their peers.

Some editorial writers have looked askance at the most recent pay hikes, considering that Rendell’s administration is asking the system to tighten spending in response to a looming budget deficit.

One observer views the escalating presidential pay at both public and private colleges and universities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere as unavoidable.

Raymond D. Cotton, a Washington attorney and expert on university presidents’ compensation, said the higher-education sector is confronting a brain drain because so many university executives are at or near retirement age. About half of all college presidents are over 62, he noted.

During the last major wave of retirements in the early 1980s, a healthy pipeline of ambitious vice presidents and provosts helped fill the void, Cotton said. That is no longer the case because many people occupying those lower-level slots are preparing to retire as well, he said.

Compounding the problem for public universities is the growing gap between public and private presidential pay. Public university presidents earn about half as much as their private university counterparts, according to a 2004 study by University of Richmond economics professor James Monks.

In Pennsylvania, state system officials view the current salary structure as an important advance in the system’s evolution. Before the system —formerly a group of teachers’ colleges — was established in 1983, university presidents were hired and fired at will by the governor, system spokesman Kenn Marshall said.

By the time Gov. Robert P. Casey took office in 1987, the salaries of the presidents and the system chancellor were rising close to his pay level. Under a “gentleman’s agreement” between the governor and the chairman of the system’s governing board, their pay was kept below what Casey earned.

That restriction was lifted after Gov. Tom Ridge succeeded Casey eight years later.

“He understood that we had to look at our market and compare salaries there, not with others in state government,” Marshall said.

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