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Amy Gutmann's salary is now over $3.5 million She remains one of the highest-paid university presidents in the country







Penn President Amy Gutmann’s total salary climbed to a record $3,537,020 in 2015, according to the most recent records Penn filed to the Internal Revenue Service.

Gutmann’s compensation package, a 6.09 percent increase from what she brought home in 2014, remains one of the largest in the country. A report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which used data from 2014 and before, recently listed Gutmann’s salary as the fourth-highest nationwide and the top among all Ivy League presidents.

Top administrators’ salary information became available this week with the public release of the University’s 2015 Form 990, an annual requirement for nonprofit institutions like Penn. Because of the lag in federal reporting requirements, the 2015 form — covering Jul. 1, 2015 to Jun. 30, 2016 — is the most recent period from which data is available.

Gutmann’s seven-figure salary follows a trend noted in higher education of late, where university presidents are compensated in a manner similar to CEOs or Wall Street executives. Over 50 percent of Gutmann’s compensation in 2015 came in the form of bonuses, performance-based incentive pay and deferred compensation.

“Across a hugely complex institution, Dr. Gutmann had substantially met each and every one of her aggressive goals and has succeeded phenomenally,” Penn Board of Trustees Chair David Cohen, who heads the committee that determines Gutmann’s compensation, said in an email.

“Indeed, we believe Amy Gutmann is the best university president in the country, and her compensation should reflect that,” he added.

Gutmann’s total compensation, which has risen a stunning 341 percent since the year she received her first paycheck as Penn president, has not always been so dominated by incentive pay. Only in the last three years for which data is available has “bonus and incentive compensation” comprised the largest chunk of her compensation package.

Despite her multimillion dollar salary, Gutmann did not top the list of Penn’s highest-paid employees in 2015.

That honor fell to Tom Beeman, the chief operating officer for regional operations at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, who collected $4,822,512. His hefty payday in 2015 arose from “a one time payment of over $3 million” as part of a retirement package “accumulated over 11 years,” Susan Phillips, a spokesperson for Penn Medicine, said in an email.

Other top earners were J. Larry Jameson, the executive vice president of the UPHS and dean of the Perelman School of Medicine, and Ralph Muller, the CEO of UPHS. Typically, executives from Penn Medicine round out the group of Penn administrators earning over $1 million a year.

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