Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun may not be the highest-paid university administrator in Massachusetts, but at more than $900,000 a year as of 2009, I think it’s fair to say he’s doing pretty well.
When I called Aoun’s office last week, I was upfront with the president’s executive assistant, Susie Guszcza: some people might consider the questions I had for Dr. Aoun a little impolite. I wanted to ask about his salary, and whether or not he believed that the size of his salary and the salaries of others in academic administration played a significant role in the staggering cost of higher education.
My questions would be relayed to the appropriate people, Guszcza said.
While I waited for a call back, I went back to my research: if Aoun earned $912,983 from June 2008 through June 2009 (as the university’s tax return attested), I wondered, how much income had his predecessor, Richard Freeland, earned a decade earlier?
My questions arise in the context of a debate that, in my view, Dr. Aoun is trying to sidetrack. Most recently, Aoun stepped up to rebut Pay Pal mogul Peter Theil’s rip at the cost of college education. Proclaiming the college degree “overvalued,” Theil paid 20 undergrads $100,000 each to drop out of college and start a business—a public relations stunt that quickly had legions of media wags and at least one college president talking.
Aoun first responded to Theil’s gesture with a commentary for CNN, then appeared on New England Cable News with anchor Mike Nikitas. Nikitas acknowledged in his segment that he is the father of three kids in college. Citing statistics from inflationdata.com, which reported that the inflation in the cost of higher education over the last 25 years amounts to 467 percent, or more than four times the national inflation of 107 percent, he asked Aoun why Theil’s criticism is wrong.
Rather than justify the rise in the cost of college, Aoun admonished viewers not to “look at the sticker price only,” insisted that there is “financial aid available for the middle class,” and warned of the costs of not going to college in the form of lower earnings over a lifetime and high unemployment in the current recession. He had made the same points in his CNN column: “the government reported that 95.5 percent of college graduates 25 and older were employed compared with 90.3 percent of high school graduates and 85.4 percent of those without a high school diploma.
“In addition, a new Georgetown University study … found that, overall, college graduates make 84 percent more over a lifetime than their high school-educated counterparts.”
The college marketplace offers a wide variety of choices and “price points,” Aoun said, and if the “full residential experience” is too expensive, there are more affordable options.
Nikitas gave Aoun ample chance to address the pain the rising cost of college had inflicted on American families. He noted that most financial aid comes in the form of loans, causing students to graduate overwhelmed by debt.
The college president smiled stoically and stuck by his story: “The college education is an investment for life and it pays off.”
Clearly, it has paid off for him.
While recent years have been hard on a lot of people, they’ve been very good for Aoun, who saw his personal compensation increase by $300,000—from about $600,000 to more than $900,000—between 2006 and 2009, a 50 percent increase over three years. Northeastern paid Aoun’s predecessor, President Freeland, $305, 807 in 1998—about a third of what the university paid Aoun in 2009.
A day or so after my initial contact, I heard back from Renata Nyui, Northeastern’s Director of Communications (not to be confused with Communications Director Jim Chiavelli, who is another of the 52 staffers in Northeastern’s External Affairs department). She told me Aoun was out of town. I told her I knew the college had not responded to inquiries from Northeastern’s student paper, The Huntington News, about Aoun’s salary last December, but that I would hold up my column for a week to give Aoun a chance to respond.
A week later, having heard nothing, I called Nyui and left the message that I’d waited long enough.
I’m disappointed that Dr. Aoun didn’t call, but not surprised. Although my impolite questions might be asked of many college administrators, I focused on Aoun because he chose to jump headlong into the debate about high costs. Yet in the end he didn’t seem interested in talking about costs or how to control them. I bet he’d be even less inclined to talk about the widening income gap in America and how he and other academic leaders might help narrow it again.”
