You may have seen a news article with a title like:
- At several private colleges, president’s payday surpasses $1M
- Report: Many private college presidents make $1M
Besides your article’s point that salaries for private
colleges’ presidents and other executives have increased and that there are 17%
more than there were last year, I find the information lacking a salient degree
of appropriate informative rigor and intellectual completeness. To be honestly
helpful to your readers it would be relevant to provide them with some
comparative basis and referential data upon which to assist them in putting
this report into a proper perspective. So this is a ‘teachable moment’, as one
of the popular performance improvement concepts asserts, that could benefit
both media producers and the reading public.
First, the 17% increase sounds like a lot. If I earned 17%
more salary or income from investments this year versus last year I would
consider that very good and impressive performance. However, I would be less
impressed, and it would be significantly less meaningful if my salary was $100
and is now $117 or my investments were $1.00 and is now $1.17. So is the number
of presidents that crossed that magic threshold really impressive or only ‘out
of context’ apparently impressive? If it represents 6 individuals would readers
be more underwhelmed; consider that 6 out of 500 private colleges is a
staggering 1.2% increase in millionaires amongst these CEO-like individuals.
Now this statistical clarification doesn’t address the question of whether private
college presidents are generally paid more than would warranted, but the
information provided is well equally insufficient in establishing a relevant
assessment on that question either. So what exactly is the point that the 17%
is intended to make?
Second, the fact that there was a 17% increase in the number
of private college millionaires from 36 before this year to 42 now is perhaps explainable
for reasons that are not overly unexpected and may be completely valid and
predictable if the starting salary level before their current year increase
represented nothing more than a normal ‘keeping pace with inflation’ or COLA
increment. What was the average percent increase that each of these 6
individuals received that pushed them over that magic one-million dollar
threshold. If they were already earning $975,000.00 then they got a 2.6% raise.
Not overly impressive if that’s all that was producing this astonishing result.
Now lacking the information that would allow me to know what the underlying
mathematical ‘cause and effect’ phenomena is, I am left wondering does your
article inform me, educate me, provide me with a rationale for taking a
position, or creating a basis for others to question the judgments of the
private colleges’ regents or boards in this and related matters.
Lastly, what other factors play into the salaries that these
institutions’ presidents are behind the justification and value of paying them
such salaries. Now if their arguments are generally that in order to get
qualified individuals of the caliber that they need is their basic argument
then I would contend that they are either clueless regarding how to efficiently
and effectively perform the fiduciary responsibilities that their positions
require, or that they are individually or collectively benefiting from this administrative
pay-scale educational counter-part to ‘grade inflation’.
So I don’t question the facts in your article, but I think
after reading this you might agree that there were one or two other worthy and
salient pieces of data that could have served the readers, your organization
and yourself better if they had been thought about in the preparation of the
article. Don’t feel that this assessment is solely directed at you, I assure
you that you are just an unfortunate data sample from the complete universe of
new media producers.
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