Presidential pay soars above inflation at Pitt, CMU, while faculty wages lag behind

Many people make universities run. Presidents oversee multibillion-dollar budgets and fundraise for the institution. Faculty teach courses and mentor students. Staff and administrators manage enrollment and the student experience.

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These employees have different job responsibilities and are paid different salaries. But in the last decade, the president of Carnegie Mellon University and the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh have seen their salaries balloon in excess of inflation, while faculty, on average, have seen their pay stagnate or fail to keep pace with rising living costs, PublicSource found.

Pitt’s chancellor — the university’s top leadership position — earned $583,836 in base compensation during the 2014 fiscal year, financial documents show. About a decade later, a committee of the Board of Trustees approved a $950,000 base salary for Joan Gabel, the incoming chancellor. That’s an increase of $366,164, which is roughly 24% above inflation.

The average salary for faculty on Pitt’s main campus, however, fell 4% below inflation during roughly the same period, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. The average full-time faculty member earned $103,531 in the 2022-2023 academic year, but there were pay differences by rank that ranged from roughly $50,000 to $150,000.

The picture is similar at nearby CMU. President Farnam Jahanian earned $995,988 in base compensation during the 2022 fiscal year. That’s $466,308 more than the president earned a decade prior and represents about a 52% increase above inflation.

During roughly the same time, the average salary for faculty fell 2% below inflation and stood at $122,259 during the 2022-2023 academic year.

Similar disparities exist at many other universities. The total inflation-adjusted compensation of presidents at nearly every state’s public flagship university grew by 56% between 2010 and 2019, according to research from professor emeritus James Finkelstein and research professor Judith Wilde of George Mason University. During that time, faculty salaries fell behind inflation at nearly half the institutions.

The trend is not unique to higher education, Finkelstein said in an interview, adding that similar gaps between executives and workers exist in the private sector. “That’s just a phenomenon of the American workplace today, and I don’t think that is likely to change, in any significant way, in the foreseeable future.”

Peter Kerwin, a spokesperson for CMU, wrote in a statement that the 10-year comparison of average faculty salaries can’t be made because the composition of the university’s faculty has changed. He said the university has hired more assistant and associate professors, who make less on average than full professors , during the period analyzed.

However, he compared the average salary for all of CMU’s faculty to the university’s peer institutions, which are the country’s other top private research universities. He said that the average salary, without accounting for inflation, has increased at a rate that aligns with those institutions.

“Given that a majority of our peers are in large metropolitan areas on the east and west coasts where the cost of living is much higher, we believe that CMU’s faculty salaries are very competitive,” Kerwin said.

There are several likely factors behind the trend in higher education, Finkelstein and Wilde said.

For one, the salaries of university presidents are made public and published each year in outlets such as The Chronicle of Higher Education , placing upward pressure on the job market. Universities may also believe that offering higher salaries will attract leaders who will perform better, a notion that Finkelstein said is misguided.

Doug Browning, the former chair of Pitt’s Board of Trustees, echoed that idea during an April 2023 meeting to set Gabel’s base salary. Browning said consultants had found that the base salary of outgoing chancellor Patrick Gallagher, which totaled $698,202 in 2023, had fallen below about half of Pitt’s public university peers.

“We therefore knew that, to attract the type of leader we believed this institution needed to continue to ascend to greater heights, it would be necessary to bring our new chancellor in at a salary that was significantly higher than that of Chancellor Gallagher,” Browning said during the meeting.

The vast majority of universities use executive search firms. These firms are often paid a percentage of a new leader’s salary, incentivizing more expansive contracts and higher salaries, Wilde said. On top of that, presidents often hire attorneys who specialize in negotiating compensation, which can place universities at a disadvantage if they use in-house counsel lacking similar expertise.

But the pay gaps between presidents and faculty aren’t entirely the result of search firms, lawyers and competition for talent. The challenging nature of the president’s job is cited frequently as another reason for their increases in pay, Finkelstein said, adding that university presidents are commonly believed to either “age out or burn out” of their roles.

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“These are demanding jobs. They’re 24/7, 365. Even when you’re on vacation, you’re not really on vacation — unless you’re at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and you can’t get a cell signal,” he said. A 2022 survey of presidents from the American Council on Education found that more than half of respondents planned to step down within five years.

On the faculty side, public universities like Pitt may also cut spending on salaries to offset declines in state funding, said Glenn Colby, senior researcher at the American Association of University Professors. The membership organization for faculty engages in advocacy and seeks to “advance the rights of academics.”

Pennsylvania’s funding of public higher education, per full-time student, ranked second to last nationally in the 2022 fiscal year and fell by about 42% over roughly two decades, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

During the April 2023 meeting, Browning said the board is aware that “many” of its faculty and staff salaries need to be adjusted to remain competitive with Pitt’s public peer institutions. “We are committed to supporting the ongoing efforts of the administration to close the gap as soon as possible,” he said.

Pitt spokesperson Jared Stonesifer told PublicSource in a statement that the university regularly studies salaries over 15-year periods. The most recent study, which reflects faculty who worked at the institution in fall 2005 through fall 2020, found that 87% of salaries for the analyzed positions exceeded the rate of inflation during that time period.

Roughly 930 faculty qualified for the survey. The university’s main campus employed more than 1,800 full-time faculty in the 2020-2021 academic year.

Kerwin, at CMU, said “we engage in regular reviews of faculty salary to assure that we are able to attract and retain the best and brightest faculty.”

Faculty organizing may soon bring tangible changes to Pitt. In late April, the university reached a tentative agreement on a first contract with the faculty union’s bargaining committee. If the rest of the union ratifies the contract, Pitt will implement a $60,000 salary floor for most full-time faculty in July.

Stonesifer wrote: “The university values our faculty and their countless contributions to our Pitt community and this agreement demonstrates the university’s significant investment in our faculty.”

Finkelstein said it is worth questioning whether university presidents should be paid as much as they are, particularly because of the missions of universities.

“These are educational, cultural institutions. They’re not responsible to shareholders, they’re responsible to faculty, staff, students and a greater society,” he said. “Their goal is to produce an educated citizenry and to develop new knowledge. So, do you really need to pay someone a million bucks a year to do that?”

Emma Folts covers higher education at PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus. She can be reached at emma@publicsource.org .

This story was fact-checked by Elizabeth Szeto.

About the data:

We analyzed data on executive compensation that universities report to the IRS, through Form 990s. The data reflects reported base compensation and does not factor in the reported deferred, bonus or incentive compensation. Finkelstein said it is possible that some institutions are rolling bonuses into base compensation.

To calculate the compensation of CMU’s president, we pulled the base compensation reported in Form 990s that reflect the calendar years from 2011 to 2021. We used the CPI Inflation Calculator from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate what the base compensation in each calendar year totaled in December 2021. For example, $775,507 in December 2015 equals $914,122.83 in December 2021 dollars. Once each year was adjusted to December 2021 dollars, we calculated the increase over time.

We took a slightly different approach for Pitt’s chancellor. We took the base compensation reported in the university’s Form 990 for the 2013 calendar year and adjusted the number for inflation. We then compared that number to the $950,000 base salary that the university publicly announced in April 2023 because the Form 990 is not yet available for this period. The new chancellor began her role in July 2023.

For faculty salaries at both institutions, we pulled data on the average salaries of all full-time, non-medical instructional staff, regardless of rank, equated to 9-month contracts. The data is reported to the U.S. Department of Education. We used the inflation calculator to calculate what the average salary in each academic year totaled in December 2022, the most recent calendar year for which data is available.

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