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Highest compensated private university presidents

This is not the kind of information that would motivate me to increase (or even maintain) my donation to Wake Forest, particularly while I am paying college tuition for one child and saving for two others.
 
That's also a deceptive number if it is as written. According to the article:

"Topping the list was Wake Forest University’s Nathan Hatch, whose total pay of $4 million included a payment of nearly $3 million as a perk for leading the North Carolina school for 10 years."

It looks like his salary is $1M and he got a $3M bonus for lasting ten years. If this is so, next year, he'll make $1M which would put him among the "while another 48 made at least $1 million" and make sense in the market.
 
Seems like he tops the list bc of a one time ten year anniversary bonus
 
I would imagine that not many university presidents remain at a school for 10 years.
 
Yeah, flawed reporting on real numbers. Real #fakenews, if you will.
 
Yeah, flawed reporting on real numbers. Real #fakenews, if you will.

How would you propose they report his salary ? Should they go back and revise the list for the past 10 years, spreading the $3 million out over those years ?
 
How would you propose they report his salary ? Should they go back and revise the list for the past 10 years, spreading the $3 million out over those years ?

I don't think it's correct to include a 1-time bonus/retirement dump in this kind of compilation. Per the article: "Nine of the top 10 earners made most of their pay through bonuses and deferred-compensation plans, which provide one-time payments for reaching milestones."

They should look at base pay and bonuses as separate items. If someone is eyeing the top job at one of these schools, it's disingenuous to suggest they would make $3-4mil.
 
Why is it flawed to report this way? It's compensation, not just salary, and bonuses should be included in the former. They certainly are if you're the IRS.
 
Salary and income (that you report to the IRS) are not the same thing.

Your salary is your base pay. What does it cost to replace you. Your income is whatever you've made over the course of the year, to include salary.
 
Ultimately it's all semantics- the paper said "Highest Paid" ... but it's not exactly his pay (which most people infer to be 'salary'). It's his compensation, which includes his base pay and bonuses. Yes, that's what the article goes on to say, but in the Twitter universe I think it matters how you title your articles. Otherwise you end up with a whole bunch of misinformed people getting upset that we pay him $4mil a year (we don't) because they didn't actually read the article.
 
Ultimately it's all semantics- the paper said "Highest Paid" ... but it's not exactly his pay (which most people infer to be 'salary'). It's his compensation, which includes his base pay and bonuses. Yes, that's what the article goes on to say, but in the Twitter universe I think it matters how you title your articles. Otherwise you end up with a whole bunch of misinformed people getting upset that we pay him $4mil a year (we don't) because they didn't actually read the article.

How would you have titled the article?
 
"Wake Forest University president tops 2015 list of total compensation, compensation among all top private university leaders on the rise."

Something like that. I don't know what other rules there are for things like that in journalism. I just know that specificity matters, as do semantics, when you only have but so many words that can fit into a headline space.


Edit to add: It's obviously not as sensational to title it this way, which is why papers started crafting headlines that make people go "!!!" (because $)... but now that we have a crapload of people who get their news solely from the titles and not the actual articles, it's screwing up the actual news.
 
"This bonus is not my pay. It's my compensation."
 
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