By Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters
Update: On Nov. 19, 2025 the Board of Trustees voted to approve the new compensation plan, with only Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis casting a no vote. Thirteen of the system’s presidents got base raises because of what they were owed under a previous pay policy. The raises range from 5% to 20% and apply retroactively to July. Several others are slated to receive performance-based raises of 5% to 15% in the 2026-27 fiscal year.
California State University’s trustees will vote tomorrow on whether to increase how much the system’s 22 campus presidents and other senior executives earn, potentially paving the way for up to 15% in annual incentive-based raises paid for by philanthropic funds and base salaries that reflect how much presidents at similar universities earn.
Exact numbers aren’t available; those will be revealed during tomorrow morning’s board meeting. Committee members will discuss the matter and decide on whether to advance the idea during a scheduled vote before noon. The full board will vote on the measure in the afternoon. The plan will kick in the next year or two. No executives will receive raises under the proposed plan this year.
Several hundred unionized staff and faculty rallied outside the board of trustees meeting today, raging against the proposed executive raises at a time of budget austerity, layoffs and program cuts.
“I am mad,” said Erin Foote, a union board member for California State Employees Union, during the rally. The union represents 35,000 office and student workers. The union is in a dispute with the system over additional raises. “We are going to knock the doors of our legislators so hard there will be holes in them until they stand with us in their budget negotiations,” she said, and vowed to organize for a governor who’d replace Cal State’s chancellor and appoint more union-friendly trustees.
Average base pay for campus presidents currently is $453,000, ranging from $370,000 to more than $500,000, system data show.
Under the compensation plan, raises to executive base pay would be part of overall wage increases for Cal State workers. That’s in addition to the 15% incentive-based bump to base pay executives would be eligible for.
The criteria for receiving the 15% increases hasn’t been finalized, said the system’s interim chief financial officer, Patrick Lenz, in an interview last week. The chancellor’s office will need a year or two to work on that, he said.
The plan would depart from Cal State’s previous standard of capping base pay of presidents at a salary that’s no more than 10% above what their predecessors made. That plan, last updated 18 months ago, “inappropriately prevents the CSU from offering competitive compensation” to presidents who can lead large universities, the chancellor’s office staff wrote for the board meeting agenda item.
High-ed landscape in turmoil
The overhaul comes at a time when the system is hurting for cash and is also contending with epochal challenges to higher education as the Trump administration seeks to claw back billions in funding to universities and challenge long-held academic freedoms at campuses.
Last month Cal State pushed through initial hesitation to seek a $144 million zero-interest loan from California lawmakers, a financing deal the Legislature permitted to compensate for an equally sized cut to the system’s state support this year. System leaders say they want to use the money to offer one-time bonuses to unionized workers and other staff, including senior executives. Union members want ongoing raises that also support expanded benefits.
And Cal State is expecting smaller increases in state support than lawmakers initially signalled. The Legislature intends to increase state spending for Cal State in 2026-27 by just $101 million — far lower than previous promises from Gov. Gavin Newsom of about $250 million.
That’s upset some system trustee members, who say they OK’d raises for workers — many who went on strike for higher pay — and other spending increases based on those promises.
Cal State explains need for plan
In explaining the increased executive compensation proposal, a senior Cal State official said few individuals have the experience and skill set to run campuses with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“We want people in these positions who will ensure that a campus’s fiscal condition is spot on, that they’re trying to meet enrollment challenges, that they’re dealing with the overwhelming fact that the state’s going to be hard pressed to invest in higher education over the next couple of years, and the federal government is decimating us,” said Lenz.
“These are the people that we need to come in and help us get through these really tough times,” he added.
Cal State in the last four years increased staff and faculty pay by 17%, Chief Human Resources Officer Frank Hurtarte told CalMatters last week. He said campus presidents saw a 7% raise in that time span.
The faculty union calculates that presidential pay has grown 81% in the past two decades even as inflation grew 63%.
While typical executive pay is several times what it is for faculty and staff, the vast majority of the system’s spending goes toward pay for workers who aren’t executives — $5.6 billion, or 73% of the system’s budget, wrote Jason Maymon, a Cal State spokesperson, in an email.
Executives — the systemwide chancellor, campus presidents and vice chancellors in the central office — collectively earn $18 million, or .25% of the Cal State operating budget, Maymon wrote when asked. That’s about as much as the chancellor’s office cut from its budget this year, part of a systemwide effort to slash costs, including letting go of some lecturers.
Hurtarte pointed out that nationally about 30% to 40% of campus presidents left their jobs in the past 24 months. Cal State has six campuses with president vacancies, he noted. There’s both a lot of churn in the campus presidential job market and competition to fill vacancies.
Margarita Berta-Ávila, president of the California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 members, said in an interview that the executives have mismanaged state and tuition money and don’t deserve raises anyway. Some faculty don’t earn enough to afford rent in expensive cities, she said.
“It’s unconscionable that they’re even talking about (the raises) when you got people living in cars,” she said. She’s also upset that leadership at Cal State Los Angeles shared faculty names and other personal information with the federal government as part of an investigation into alleged antisemitism. The union has sued the Cal State board of trustees.
Pay plan details
Executive compensation under the proposed plan would have four components: base pay, standard executive health and retirement benefits plus housing and car perks for presidents, a new deferred compensation plan and the possibility of the annual pay rising by as much as 15% after a performance review.
While the base pay, like much of Cal State’s budget, would be paid with tuition and state revenue, the extra 15% would be funded with campus philanthropic efforts. Each university has a fundraising arm and they’d be expected to raise the money to supplement presidents’ pay, Lenz said.
That fundraising money will also go toward the new deferred compensation program, basically an additional retirement account for executives at nonprofit or governmental organizations, such as universities.
Cal State wouldn’t be alone in paying campus leaders with private funds. At the University of California, several campus heads, called chancellors, have a portion of their salaries paid with outside funds.
“Compensation decisions must also be fiscally prudent, align with the CSU’s public mission, and be made within the constraints of available funding and budget priorities,” the agenda item says.
Under this plan the systemwide chancellor will propose raises each November for board approval.
The new compensation plan seeks to better attract and retain campus presidents by offering new presidents and other executives a base salary that reflects what peer universities pay and the skills the candidate brings. Those peer institutions include the public college and university systems in New York, Texas State University and the UC, Maymon wrote.
Under the current policy, raises for incumbents are also no higher than 10%. They kick in only after a satisfactory employee review and an analysis of whether the executive was underpaid relative to other presidents across the country. This approach “constrains competitiveness and adds administrative burden,” the agenda item says. The 10% cap for incumbents would also sunset in favor of the eligibility for annual 15% incentive pay.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
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This is similar to what I heard is going on at our local college, SBCC. They are giving the president (who is not well-liked) a raise and other benefits while she keeps claiming the budget picture is really bad. “Cut classes, crowd your classes with students and don’t rehire part time faculty, but I’ll take a raise that isn’t going to be extended to the other employees.” What are the trustees thinking???
Yeah, like the UC system there really isn’t a heck of a lot of leverage built in to reign in top-level admin. salaries. They seem to make their own rules. And the Regents don’t have a lot of reason to fight against that either. Students largely take the brunt of these pay raises in the end. It’s what they call a “systems-based failure”. The system isn’t set up to have to do the right thing. Not any checks and balances. It ends up in student and staff-led demonstrations, strikes, etc. which only sometimes amount to anything.
What does “reign in” mean?
Perhaps Gavin should step in and do something about his state’s spiraling cost of education. Or does he even care?
BASIC – what should he do? This is capitalism. Funny how you want socialism but don’t even know it.
Capitalism??
Public, taxpayer-funded educational institutions such as the UC’s and CSU’s are not for-profit institutions at the expense of the people who support them. Hell no.
Socialism? I don’t think so. Swing and a miss. This is basic fiscal responsibility to working folks who pay taxes here in our state and country. I think you are mistaking public colleges for private ones. You surely must know the difference between a UCSB and a Stanford. But hey, maybe not. If the UC’s and CSU’s want to keep trying to make $$$$ off international students and passing on their profits on to Presidents and other high-level admin’s they currently can. And that’s shame for you and your kids. It takes away from the education and future of our kids here in the state and dollars out of the accounts of the parents who help pay for their college. And don’t expect a lot of loan forgiveness anytime soon. That’s called blank check economics and the party who supported that lost last time, for good reason.
Gavin could get in the ear of the Regents real quick, since he wants to be the U.S. President or something besides CA governor before too long. I bet they’d listen. But he’s just like them – all about money. So he won’t.
Civics lesson over for ya. Quiz on Friday.
Oh golly, you’re not very bright. How do you not understand how public schools in general are the product of socialism? WE pay for them.
“UC’s and CSU’s are not for-profit institutions” and then in the next paragraph : “If the UC’s and CSU’s want to keep trying to make $$$$ off international students and passing on their profits on to Presidents and other high-level admin’s they currently can.” Uh….. do you know what those words mean?
UC schools, as other public universities, are allowed to increase tuition and absolutely make a profit (translating to bloated admin salaries, etc). That is capitalism. You asking the Governor to lower the cost of public education would require some form of subsidies (that means MORE TAXES). That is socialism.
No, Newsom just asking the Regents and other College/University admins to lower the cost of tuition will do nothing. If you want to lower the cost of tuition, you need to either enact legislation to cap lower and then cap tuition (government interference) or increase taxes to provide more to the schools so that they can afford to lower tuition (socialism).
You never passed civics. You would have had to pass English and you definitely didn’t.
Another disturbing step to the destruction of the state college and university systems. They used to be about California educating its own well. Now they are about status and phony management tropes. We don’t need to bribe Nobel Prize winners to dress up the faculty list. We don’t need to kneel to big pharma and other corporate “sponsors” of research and then let them take the academic and intellectual product of the state for their own profits. We don’t need to distort the enrollment to take on absurdly high numbers of out of state and out of nation students simply because they pay higher tuition. Get back to basics. The California Master Plan was to provide affordable quality higher education for every resident to the state. That worked exceedingly well until competition and churning got us so far off track.
Public schools are indeed socialistic. And there are those who constantly fight to end them, underfund them, compromise them, give them the hard part of the job. Socialism is pretty basic democracy as compared to free enterprise piracy.
UCSB has doubled its percentage of international undergrads in the last 5 years. Why?
Money.
Wow you really love socialism!
Public schools are indeed socialistic. And there are those who constantly fight to end them, underfund them, compromise them, give them the hard part of the job. Socialism is pretty basic democracy as compared to free enterprise piracy.
RHS – absolutely! That’s why I’m so surprised (but not really) to see people who constantly cry about “socialism” like BASIC unwittingly supporting it! Asking the Governor to step in and lower the cost of public university tuition likely requires subsidies in some form, ie., socialism. That, or a government interference with capitalism…. that’s the actually bad kind of socialism.
Funny to watch people cry constantly about something they don’t understand and actually rely on in many aspects of their lives.