Your tuition dollars at work

Remember, when we underwrite student loans for private schools, we subsidize this:

SIEGEL: So, who would be the highest paying university president who remained in place?

STRIPLING: That would be Nicholas Zeppos, who's the president of Vanderbilt University. He collected just under $1.9 million for the 2009 calendar year.

SIEGEL: And there's another measure used, you say, which is this year you also compared university presidents' pay to the pay of professors on their campuses. What did you find?

STRIPLING: Well, we found that, by and large, most presidents make about three and a half times that of full professors on their campus. At the same time, we found six institutions where presidents made more than 10 times that of professors on their campus. The biggest disparity was at Stevenson University in Maryland, where Kevin Manning made 16 times that of professors on this campus.

A big part of that was a deferred compensation payout that he received in 2009. But, at the same time, even if you looked at him in the year prior, he still made seven times that of professors on his campus, which was considerably greater than the median.