Bloomberg reported yesterday that the chairman and CEO of Strayer Education, Robert Silberman, was paid $41.9 million in compensation last year. Or, as Bloomberg put it, "That’s 26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university." Bloomberg went on to note that Strayer receives three-fourths of its revenue through federal student loans and grants. And Silberman is not the only executive in the proprietary sector receiving this kind of compensation; the Bloomberg article indicates that Charles Edelstein, co-CEO of the Apollo Group (corporate parent of the U. of Phoenix, the country's largest postsecondary institution) received $6.5 million in compensation last year.
Compensation of executives of for-profit education companies has been in the news of late, with all of the focus on this sector and its dependency on revenues through federal Title IV funds. Much of Silberman's compensation was in the form of stock options granted last year, so it's not as if he was paid the $42 million in salary. Nevertheless it is tempting to compare Silberman's compensation - and his responsibilities - with the heads of other postsecondary institutions.
Here's a comparison of Strayer, Penn State, and the State University of New York system (all figures are for FY2009):
| Strayer | $512 million | 54,300 | 87 | $41.9 million |
| Penn State | $4.042 billion | 92,613 | 24 | $642,760 |
| SUNY | $8.456 billion | 218,528 | 64 | $654,996 |
You can draw your own conclusions.
Posts
