You also don’t seem to know anything about high functioning nonprofit leadership either. God bless. |
Not sure how much it is market driven but vanity driven. HOS didn't make anything like these salaries in the 1990s. They made comfortable incomes but something shifted in the last 20 years and somehow schools started to equivalate being a HOS with being a CEO. Same with non profits, they saw salaries of senior leaderships soar into similar territories. I see it as a form of insider grift among a certain class rather than anything market driven. |
Potato/potata. It’s the market. |
I guarantee you can find replacements at half the salary. It can't be any harder than a principal at a large public school who makes a fraction of these salaries. You can create your own artificial market. It's still insider grifting one way or another, you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back. |
| As a private school employee/parent, I can tell you first hand that the HoS makes $500+, and has free housing, and probably some other benefits. However, when our school was raising money for a new building, the HoS donated a year's salary to the construction. So while they make a lot, I believe they are expected to be generous back to the school when needed. Just my 2 cents. |
Those are shielded, and there's no way for the public to know. |
it is absolutely market driven, because nonprofits couldn't hold on to good leaders paying them peanuts. Effective leaders left nonprofits after short stints because no matter how passionate you are about the cause, you still have bills to pay. Nonprofits couldn't find good candidates because of the pay. It took years and years of Boards asking "why can't we find and retain good leadership?" before they were finally willing to admit that pay was the root of the problem. It's taken another 20+ years for nonprofits to similarly recognize that it applies to all levels of staff, not just senior leaders and finally start paying people what they're worth, although there are still holdouts. A recent client of mine in a major southern metro really thought they were going to get a development director with 10+ years experience across all areas of fundraising for $50,000 (and absolute joke benefits, but that's another story). Big nonprofits, including large independent schools, really do need CEO leaders. These are complex organizations. And what I tell my clients is you may be a nonprofit, but you're a business. You need to act like one. Is it possible that some schools are wildly overpaying their HOS? Yeah. But that's true at for-profit business, too. Even if you somehow successfully led a revolt at your current school and convinced them to pay a new HOS half of what the local market dictates, you'd be up a creek. High quality candidates wouldn't even waste their time applying. The applicants you'd get would be inferior in one way or another (or multiple ways!). At the end of the day, you'd be unhappy with whatever fifth-tier candidate you hired, so now you have to undertake another expensive search, and significantly increase the pay to make the position attractive to qualified candidates. Never mind the damage a poor HOS will cause and has to be undone--often an expensive project. |
LOL, I will guarantee this didn’t happen. |
Now substitute "Teacher" for HOS and change the numbers to fit. You'll get the exact same result. Except the FAILURE to act on that front is steadily hollowing out the teaching profession and driving promising young people away from it. It's like spending $100K on a car then putting cheap gas in that wrecks the engine performance. But will the privates ever do anything about it? Of course not. Teachers don't make headlines with new buildings. We just do the fundamental business for the school in them. |
| Underpaying teachers and dismissing them as educated professionals with a critical skill set is not just a private school issue. It's pervasive across this country. And you're right, it absolutely drives people away. People who could be great educators never even consider it because it is so devalued in the US. So, again, it's a market issue. We don't value teachers and we pay them peanuts (publics and privates), so people don't go into the profession in the first place. Then we drive out educators with garbage pay and terrible treatment. We're at a crisis point in this country and I fear teaching will have to collapse in order for positive change to happen. |
No, we’re not okay with corporate CEOs make that much more than rank and file. Those should be capped as well. Folks have been saying this for awhile and particularly since the 07 Financial Crisis. The same BS lines are used for them. “Needing to find the right person and the pool being small”. It’s BS for corporate CEOs just as it’s BS about HOS. |
This. they need to be able to bring money to school. Tuition does not cover the total operation cost, there is endowment to grow as well. It is all about money. |
Like teaching. |
It’s obscene, especially when compared to the people actually doing the work. Anyone in this thread that’s arguing that the salary is valid is probably on the take as well. Just like the HOS’s. |
| For me, the compelling distinction is between HOS and division heads. My sense is that the difference is at least five-times. Hard to see how that makes sense. |