The IRS is out with the final report of its "Colleges and Universities Compliance Project" and it makes for interesting reading for anyone who wonders why their student loan bills, tuition bills, or the federal Pell Grant budget keeps inexorably rising. The examination of 34 colleges and universities (a sample group equally divided between public and private institutions) found that the average compensation of sports coaches was $884,746, and the average compensation of faculty was $575,632. If you exclude medical doctors from the faculty salary statistics, the average compensation for faculty members was $215,854.
These averages are drawn from a group of about 180 individuals who were not officers, directors, trustees, or "key employees" but were among the six highest-paid non-officers, non-directors, non-trustees, and non-key employees at each institution (non-ODTKEs, in IRS-ese.) In other words, they probably skew higher than what you'd find if you took a random sample of all faculty members or all coaches on a random college campus.
