Six-figure salaries for deans, directors, vice presidents

Nearly 80 percent of the highest paid state employees in the state of Virginia are public university staffers. Those individuals all pull down significant six-figure salaries, with one making over a million dollars per year.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch was able to obtain state employees’ salaries through the state’s Freedom of Information statute. The paper found that 19 of the top 25 highest-paid employees in the state are employed at public institutions of higher education.

According to the data, the top earner, Michael Rao, the president of Virginia Commonwealth University, is paid over $1 million annually. Nine of the salary earners hold positions at the University of Virginia, one of the state’s most prestigious public universities. The president of that university makes over $960,000 per year; the school’s chair of the department of surgery makes nearly $630,000.

Three of the staffers on the list work at Virginia Tech. That school’s vice president for advancement makes over $676,000 per year.

Tracy Vosburgh, a campus spokeswoman for Virginia Tech, defended those high salaries, stating that Virginia Tech is an “academically rigorous Research One Institution” and is “the land grant for the Commonwealth” that “strive[s] to have salaries that are competitive with our peers to attract and retain the best.”

“This list shows that Virginia Tech has attracted among the nation’s best in a few key positions at the highest level. The leadership at Virginia Tech has played a key role in the growth and economic stability of Roanoke and the region, the successful bid to bring Amazon and vital job growth to Northern Virginia and has positioned the university and the region in a strong position to educate and prepare the next generation in Virginia,” Vosburgh told The College Fix.

Laura Osberger, a spokeswoman for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, offered a defense of the high salaries of the leaders of colleges and universities.

“College presidents manage multi-million and sometimes billion-dollar enterprises that affect the lives of thousands of people. Thus, college and university compensation is a factor of a competitive market and complex work. In Virginia, the Boards of Visitors of our public higher education institutions negotiate the compensation packages of presidents,” Osberger told The Fix via email.

“We know that universities also compete for top faculty, particularly in areas where they can bring high amounts of research funding to the institutions,” she added, citing a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education listing the salaries of numerous university presidents from around the country. Some are significantly higher than Rao’s. William McRaven, the president of the University of Texas system, makes over two and a half million dollars per year.

That list also shows how steeply such salaries can rise in a relatively short period of time. Rao’s salary in the 2009-2010 fiscal year was listed as $488,500. Since then his pay has increased by nearly 110 percent.

Vosburgh said of Virginia’s university leaders that “both market and peer review would show [the] salaries are appropriate.”

“This list…shows that Virginia is striving to be competitive in attracting the countries best to serve the needs of the Commonwealth,” she said, adding: “We are appreciative of the support we receive from the Commonwealth. Virginia has a long standing reputation for education excellence.”

Rare effort to track wages reveals inconsistencies and a gender pay gap.

Chris Woolston

Female postdocs earn less than their male counterparts across much of the United States.Credit: Emilija Manevska/Getty

A peer-reviewed report on the salaries of nearly 14,000 postdoctoral researchers working at 52 US institutions has revealed wide disparities.

Salaries ranged from US$23,660 — the minimum wage set by the US Fair Labor Standards Act — to well over $100,000. The figures, which refer to salaries on 1 December 2016, were obtained through US Freedom of Information Act requests by members of the Future of Research, a science-advocacy group in Boston, Massachusetts.

The study represents one of few such efforts to quantify postdoc compensation in a meaningful way. Historically, it has been difficult to track postdoc wages, because individuals might be paid through their principal investigator’s grant, through their own fellowship award or directly by the university where they work. Furthermore, postdocs can be classified variously as postdoctoral scientists, research fellows, research associates or other titles, even within a single institution or organization.

---

Elite Learning Center

Academic Enrichment Programs for 1st - 8th Grade Students

Join Us To Be Elite

Tel: 571-217-2357

---

The inconsistency of compensation suggests that some institutions haven’t been paying close attention to the postdocs on their campuses, says Gary McDowell, executive director of the Future of Research and co-author of the report, which was published last November1. “We’ve found that a lot of institutions can’t count their postdocs well,” he says. “It’s fair to assume that they aren’t really checking up on things like salary.”

Between the extremes, many salaries clustered around the median of about $47,500. That’s close to the starting salary set by the US National Institutes of Health for postdocs receiving National Research Service Awards (NRSA). Although the NRSA salary guideline applies to only about 15% of NIH-funded postdocs, many institutions clearly use it as a benchmark, McDowell says.

The data also suggest that female postdocs are relatively underpaid, at least in some parts of the country. The authors collected the first names of more than 7,200 postdocs and used an algorithm to estimate gender, further breaking down the data by US geographical region (northeast, south, Midwest and west). The results suggest that female postdocs in the south were paid about $1,940 less per year than were male postdocs, on average. In the northeast, home to some of the largest and most prestigious universities in the country, female postdocs received, on average, about $1,710 less than their male equivalents. In the west and Midwest, salaries were roughly equal between male and female researchers.

---

Unique Math & Computer Science Enrichment Programs

---

Award-Winning After-School Math Program for K-12 Students

---

The cause of that gender gap is unclear. Anecdotally, McDowell says, many postdocs in recent years have told him that they have successfully negotiated for higher salaries. In his experience, those negotiators tend to be male and originate from the United States or Europe — factors that seem to give them an advantage over female researchers from other parts of the world (see also ref. 2).

Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who has served on several committees of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, applauds the release of the data and the work that went into it. “It’s important for everyone to know what postdocs are getting paid,” she says. Still, she notes, many gaps remain. The report has data from only one private university, and some of the 51 public universities in the study provided salaries for only a handful of their postdocs. “It’s not a complete picture at all,” she says.

---

    

MATH ENRICHMENT SERVICES

   

Offering serious and challenging mathematics to intellectually gifted students

---

---

McDowell hopes that increased transparency over postdoc salaries will give more researchers the knowledge and motivation to seek salaries that reflect their worth. He notes that the National Academies recommended a minimum postdoctoral salary of $50,000 in a 2018 report3 on the next generation of researchers — a suggestion that he supports as a good starting point. He would also like to see salaries adjusted to cover the cost of living in expensive areas. “It’s still too low, considering what postdocs are expected to do and the hours they are expected to put in,” he says. “These are essentially cheap staff scientists.”

Stephan, who contributed to the 2018 National Academies report, says that she has known for many years that some postdocs around the country are severely underpaid. “At most universities, postdoc pay isn’t very well centrally controlled,” she says. “You can get a faculty member who thinks they can hire people for a low salary.”

---