Yale University gave its ex-president Richard C. Levin $8.5 million as an “additional retirement benefit.” Levin already made seven figures, with a $1.15 million compensation package in 2013 and a $1.38 million compensation package in 2012. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, he was ranked 10th for overall compensation and third for base pay during that same year.
Yale’s endowment money rose $3.2 billion to $19.4 billion during his time as president, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Some of the best paid university presidents in the country include Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who received $7 million, as well as a $5.9 million payout, John Lahey, president of Quinnipac University, who was paid $3.7 million, and Lee Bolinger at Columbia University, who received $3.3 million.
A migration of corporate executives to the academic world may be partly to blame for rising university president salaries, which, on average, rose from $200,000 to nearly $300,000 from 2003 to 2012 for private university presidents, according to The American Association of University Professors, as well as a general rise in executive pay in general.
As much as 42 percent of trustees at public universities had business occupations, which included executives at large corporations, and over half of trustees held such positions at private universities, according to a 2010 survey by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Executive pay is also continuing to rise in the past few years.
When the Economic Policy Institute looked at the average compensation of CEOs in 350 publicly owned U.S. firms with the largest revenue each year, it found that CEO annual compensation rose from $12.6 million in 2011 to $15.1 million in 2013 while the average private sector non-supervisory workers’ salaries stayed mostly stagnant from $52,300 to $52,100. CEOs’ average salaries had still dipped from their peak of $20.1 million in 2000, however.
Levin is now the CEO of Coursera, a for-profit technology company that provides MOOCs, or massive open online courses, after two decades as president of Yale.
Though some are optimistic that MOOCs will translate to access for poorer students, that reality has yet to materialize.
A survey from the international science journal Nature showed that the majority of those taking these courses were already well-educated and wealthy.