Leebron ranks seventh in compensation study

By Andrew Ligeralde     1/14/15 5:16pm

Rice President David Leebron is the seventh highest paid private university president in the country. A recent study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that in 2012, the last year for which data has been released, Leebron’s total compensation amounted to $1,522,502. 

The Houston Chronicle report showed Leebron had a higher compensation than 99 percent of the other presidents on the list, including his Ivy League counterparts at Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was the highest compensated president in the country at $7,143,312.

Leebron’s base pay increased by $6,802 in 2012 to $795,395, which amounts to approximately five times more than the average salary of a full-time Rice professor. However, his base pay increase was relatively small compared to the increase of $574,191 in his total compensation that year, mainly due to deferred compensation, which moved Rice up 27 spots on the compensation ranking from 34th. Leebron’s total compensation amounts to .28 percent of the university’s expenditures, or the tuition of 40 students paying full price.

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Competitive universities often provide large compensation packages in an attempt to attract talented leaders, and use deferred components to encourage presidents to stay at the institution long-term. According to the Houston Chronicle, Rice said the deferred compensation responsible for Leebron’s pay increase was to incentivize the president to remain at Rice and carry out important changes to the university.

Such changes were outlined in the Vision for the Second Century, a ten-point plan stemmng from Leebronn’s 2005 document “Call to Conversation” that includes increasing the size of the university, bolstering funding for research, graduate and postdoctoral programs, and building new facilities and spaces. The plan also aims to grow Rice’s influence internationally. The Board of Trustees unanimously adopted the ten-point plan in December 2005.

Leebron, now approaching his 11th year as university president, announced in his annual State of the University address to the Faculty Senate in 2013 that revenue from research programs increased by 6.4 percent from the previous year, and the undergraduate student body increased by 30 percent during his presidency. In addition, construction of a number of facilities, including a new arts center, tennis complex and opera theatre, has already been approved or completed. Rice has also seen a significant increase in global reach. From 2003 to 2014, the internationl student body has grown from 3 perecent to 12 percent.

Jones College freshman Justin Bernard said he supports the V2C initiative despite the increase in salary.

“[The increase is] surprising,” Bernard said. “It’s controversial, but I feel like [Leebron is] doing a pretty good job, so I’d like to keep him.”

On the other hand, Jones College sophomore Camila Kennedy said she takes issue with the distribution of funding.

“The money should go toward the initiative, not the salary,” she said. “We want greater transparency; I just don’t understand the need for such large pay increases.”

The data regarding Leebron’s pay comes just as Rice ranked fourth among private universities and seventh among all universities in Kiplinger’s Best College Values list, which considered schools based on quality of education versus statistics such as tuition, average amount of financial aid, average student debt and four-year graduation rate. Rice had the lowest tuition among the top twenty best-value universities.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s study can be accessed at chronicle.com/factfile/private-ec-2014.

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