Where to find higher education administration salary data?

May 29, 2014 10:05 AM

I am trying to ballpark appropriate salary ranges for a variety of higher education administration/student affairs positions at a private, 4-year college in the Northeast. What sources should I be using to benchmark this data? I am familiar with the CUPA-HR Salary Survey data that is publicly available, but I am not able to pay for the full report. Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle make some data publicly available, but it is very limited in scope. Are there other sources I should be consulting?
posted by TurkishGolds to Work & Money (5 answers total)

It is common that public universities are mandated by transparency laws to publish employee salaries. For instance, here is such a page for Massachusetts. You'll have to look up who holds the position, but then you can get an idea of what their salary is. For particularly senior positions (like university president), compensation can come from other sources as well.

The term "appropriate" is a bit odd, and it would be helpful to indicate what your desire is here. Salary is negotiated based on an employer's need for the employee in question. If the employer hires the employee, then the employer and employee have mutually determined the salary is "appropriate". Otherwise, the employee would not have been hired.
posted by saeculorum at 10:28 AM on May 29, 2014

Glassdoor. Plus, most colleges list pay band data on their HR sites, along with the pay band for open positions. You can usually make best guesses from there to fill in the blanks.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 10:39 AM on May 29, 2014

If the positions you're looking at are in the top 10 highest paid positions of most universities (typically President, Provost, VPs and a few deans), they should be reported on the university's 990 filings (assuming you're talking about nonprofit colleges, of course.)
posted by cgs06 at 11:58 AM on May 29, 2014

This may or may not be helpful, but the Sac Bee publishes all CA UC and CSU salaries.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:51 AM on May 30, 2014

Seethroughny.net will give you salaries of all NY state and municipal employees, including the universities.
posted by metasarah at 7:42 PM on May 30, 2014