Casey Stevenson
NORTH ANDOVER – Twenty College Presidents in Massachusetts were featured in a recent Boston Business Journal article for their salaries in 2022.
As outlined in the title, Nine Mass. College Presidents Made $1 Million or More Last Year, nine of the twenty highest earning college presidents in Massachusetts earned over $1 million dollars. And of those nine, one was Merrimack College’s President, Christopher Hopey.
The slideshow on the website listed the Presidents from lowest to highest earning. Hopey was ninth overall and the first on the list to breach the million-dollar threshold with a reported salary of $1,177,487.
According to the Boston Business Journal, the other Presidents who made over a million dollars were:
Anthony Monaco of Tufts University ($1,208,747)
Michael Collins of UMass Chan School of Medicine ($1,260,000)
Lawrence Bacow of Harvard ($1,330,200)
Richard J. Lessard of MCPHS University ($1,449,185)
L. Rafael Reif of MIT ($1,626, 565)
Laurie Leshin of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute ($2,005,283)
Robert Brown of Boston University ($2,032,448)
And Joseph E. Aoun of Northeastern ($2,896,178).
Also listed in the report, though not making over a million dollars, were:
Maud Mandel of Williams College ($732,598)
Marty Mehan of the University of Massachusetts ($755,769)
Gilda Barabino of Olin College of Engineering ($757,782)
Paula Johnson of Wellesley College ($764,779)
Stephen Spinelli of Babson College ($765,641)
Mark Thompson of Wentworth Institute of Technology ($784,602)
Marisa Kelly of Suffolk University ($787,376)
Biddy Martin of Amherst College ($868,125)
Ronald Liebowitz of Brandeis University ($875,583)
Kathleen McCartney of Smith College ($914,988)
And David Fithian of Clark University ($959,137)
The article analyzed the salaries of 60 colleges in the state, and of those colleges, the median salary of a college president was $588,280.
Hopey’s salary has seemingly gone up throughout the duration of his tenure. In a 2021 article from MassLive, these college presidents in Massachusetts were paid more than a million dollars annually, Hopey was listed as a high-earning college president despite not crossing the million-dollar line based on the 2018 data.
According to MassLive, Hopey had earned $658,528 in 2017, and $884,835 in 2018. This 2018 figure factors in base pay of $509,750, a bonus of $102,000, nontaxable benefits of $30,208, a deferred payout/retirement of $118,375, and other benefits listed at $242,877. The Boston Business Journal had not included base pay and benefit factors in their October 2023 report.
Merrimack had also made the Boston Business Journal earlier in October in The Mass. colleges where student costs have risen the most, where Merrimack was the 20th college listed that had large increases in cost over the span of ten years. Merrimack reportedly cost $48,060 back in the 2013-2014 school year, and now costs $69,941 in the 2023-2024 school year, marking a 46% price increase in the span of a decade.
