Pay for performance? It is a myth.

With discussions in the news about CEO pay and its rise relative to average worker pay, I thought it might be interesting to look at Universities in a similar way. There is useful data on HE executive salaries here (for the UK) and here (for the US). The US data is for public universities.

In a reasonable world you might expect a VC at a top 100 university to earn more than one in the same city that is not ranked at all. You might be wrong. League tables are fraught but they are an index and hence useful. Much as I hate seeing long discussions about whether Cal Tech or Cambridge is better and by how much, I accept that there is a difference between an unranked university and a global top 100. 

So, I spent some time trying to align some of this data with data from league table rankings (QS and THE). I haven’t had a lot of time yet so only got through the first page or so of the US data. There is some relationship between base pay and ranking it is weak (explains about 24% of the variance). However, there is a really no relationship between total pay (including incentives) and ranking.

Note: unranked universities appear as 1000. 

There are 5 US universities in the top 20 for highest paid executives which are not ranked in either league table. I do not see how this makes sense. The graph is puzzling.