California State University presidents received pay increases this fall that pushed their average base salaries to nearly half a million dollars; a move the Board of Trustees framed as necessary to attract talent, but one that has drawn criticism from faculty, union leaders and at least one state lawmaker as campuses face budget shortfalls, class reductions and layoffs.
The raises, approved by the CSU Board of Trustees in November, come with a policy overhaul that removed the previous 10% cap on annual salary hikes for executives. Most presidents are also now eligible for performance-based bonuses, which can top out at 15% of their base salary. Other presidents will receive lower bonuses, in the range of 5% or 10%, depending on their salary level.. The changes formalize a compensation structure that diverges sharply from what faculty receive through collective bargaining, where raises remain capped in the single digits.
At Sacramento State, President Luke Wood’s total compensation package — including a $60,000 housing allowance and $12,000 transportation stipend — will exceed $627,000. Totals for some executive allowances are higher than the salaries of some lecturers. In the English department alone, lecturer pay in 2024 ranged from $13,000 to $86,000, according to CSU payroll data. Nearly half — 12 of 27 lecturers with reported salaries — earned less than Sacramento’s roughly $57,000 cost of living for a single adult.
In a brief interview, Wood described his role as “being the president of a small city” — overseeing 31,000 students, 5,000 employees and a budget approaching three-quarters of a billion dollars when auxiliaries are included. He said the job is relentless. “My average day starts at 6 a.m. I go to 11 or 12 at night, wake up at 3, 4 a.m. and do text messages and that’s seven days a week.”
Sac State President Luke Wood. Dec. 16, 2025.Gerardo Zavala/CapRadio
Asked whether pay motivated his pursuit of the role, Wood was unequivocal: “It had zero to do with it, actually, for me personally.” He said he had wanted the job since he was 19 years old, when he was a student at Sacramento State. He also emphasized his background in labor organizing, including stints with AFSCME, ACORN and SEIU. “I believe in unions,” he said. “I believe in what they stand for.”
Wood did not engage in detail regarding questions about the pay disparity between executives and faculty.
That wide gap is what faculty leaders say stings most. Not the dollar amounts alone, but the timing and the message.
Margarita Berta-Ávila is president of the California Faculty Association and a professor at Sacramento State. She said the CSU Board of Trustees approved the presidential pay raises the day after union leaders rallied at the Chancellor’s Office demanding the system honor previously negotiated faculty pay increases and restore cut positions.
Instead, the Chancellor announced a one-time taxable payment equivalent to 3% of employees’ pay. It was paid for by a $144 million interest-free state loan that unions had urged be used to restore jobs and classes.
“You say that there is no money,” Berta-Ávila said of her thinking before the board’s vote on presidential pay. “But yet you’re contemplating raises that are astronomical.”
She pointed to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo President Jeffrey Armstrong, whose base salary rose from $509,336 to $611,203 — an increase of more than $100,000, or roughly 20%. Armstrong is also now eligible for performance pay of up to 15% of that new base. Factoring in his $12,000 transportation allowance, Armstrong could take home nearly $715,000 a year.
“It’s astronomical and it’s unconscionable,” Berta-Ávila said of the executive pay hikes, “when you have people that cannot even sustain themselves.”
In campus visits across the Cal State system since taking office six months ago, Berta-Ávila said she has encountered “utter frustration, low morale” and faculty struggling to cover basic expenses. She described physical conditions — falling ceiling tiles at San Diego State, water damage and mold at a Cal State LA library — as visible evidence of misaligned priorities. And she said some lecturers are living in their cars.
“They won’t come here and tell you that,” she said, referring to their reluctance to speak publicly about their living conditions. “But we know folk who are doing so.”
The lowest-paid full-time lecturer in the CSU system earns just over $66,000 annually, Berta-Ávila said — but most lecturers are not full-time. Many earn less than half that amount. Meanwhile, the lowest-paid CSU campus president makes $370,319 in base pay, plus a $12,000 transportation allowance, and a $60,000 housing allowance, a total of $442,319. That’s roughly a 570% difference, or what nearly seven full-time lecturers earn combined.
Carolyn Pickrel, an English lecturer at Sacramento State who serves as the only temporary faculty representative to the campus Faculty Senate, said the reaction among her colleagues was less outrage than resignation.
“I would call it kind of an eye roll,” Pickrel said. “We have to really fight for pay increases. We have to fight for classes to help students to succeed. And so, well, this is typical of how things go for us.”
Pickrel described a tiered system of lecturer employment that ranges from full-time, three-year contracts, which she called rare, to semester-by-semester hires who receive no job security and often piece together work at multiple institutions. When the budget is cut, lecturers lose work even if there’s no formal layoff announcement. “They just don’t have classes next semester,” she said. “So on paper, no one was laid off. But in reality, people lost their income.”
The CSU has defended the raises by pointing to a compensation study by consulting firm Segal. The company found that 82% of the system’s campus presidents had base salaries below the 25th percentile of their peers at comparable institutions nationwide. It concluded CSU was spending just 84% of the market median on total executive pay.
The CSU Chancellor’s Office declined an interview request for this story, directing inquiries to the Board of Trustees’ November 19 meeting where the raises were approved. The office also provided a more detailed summary of the compensation study conducted by Segal.
Critics have raised questions about the study methodology.
Rama Malladi, a finance professor at CSU Dominguez Hills, noted that the comparison set for executive pay differs from the one used in a 2023 faculty compensation study. He said that makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. Malladi also pointed out that California community colleges, which often serve comparable student populations and have similar enrollment sizes, were excluded from the analysis. Their executive compensation, he said, runs about 50% lower than the CSU’s.
“If those institutions were included as peers,” Malladi said, “the conversation might look very different.”
He also questioned the lack of publicly disclosed performance metrics. “What exactly is the metric that is used to measure these compensations?” he asked. “If they disclosed it, it would have been perfect.”
Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University who has studied hundreds of university presidential contracts, said CSU salaries are not outliers by national standards. “For smaller public universities, this level of pay is not unusual,” she said. Flagship universities often pay far more; sometimes well into the millions.
But Wilde cautioned against focusing solely on base pay. “In many contracts we’ve studied, bonuses and raises are awarded without clear metrics,” she said. “If you’re a statistician, that’s a problem. You want to know what success looks like and how it’s measured.”
She noted that executive pay debates intersect with broader staffing trends. In a study of flagship universities, Wilde found that presidential compensation grew 50% between 2009 and 2019, while full professors at the same institutions gained an average of just $646 over that decade; after adjusting for inflation.
“When more classes are taught by contingent faculty with little job security, pay disparities become more visible and more painful,” Wilde said.
Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley and is a graduate of San Jose State, has emerged as one of the few legislators to publicly criticize the raises. He called the decision “a breach of public trust” and said he is exploring legislative remedies to increase oversight of executive compensation.
“It’s not always just about the bottom line,” Ahrens said. “It’s about what we are projecting to the public; that it is okay to give massive increases in executive compensation in the same budget where they are operating a deficit, in the same budget that they are cutting classes, in the same budget that they are cutting faculty and staff positions.”
Ahrens cited a 2016-17 California State Auditor report that found CSU management personnel and compensation had expanded, to a level Ahrens called “out of control.” Since that report, according to data cited by the lawmaker, spending on management has increased by $145 million — from $459 million to $604 million annually. The system now has one manager for every 100 students, compared to one full-time mental health counselor for every 1,800 students.
“I don’t think any CSU administrator should be making more than the President of the United States or more than the governor of the state of California,” Ahrens said. “If you want to make the private sector money, then go work in the private sector.”
The U.S. president earns $400,000 a year; California’s governor makes $242,295. All but one of the current CSU presidents now exceed both figures.
At the lawmaker’s alma mater, San Jose State, Ahrens said the divide is stark: “We literally have a large student homeless population. We also have faculty and staff members who are homeless as well.” The president at San Jose State now earns a base salary of $546,066, with potential total compensation reaching nearly $640,000 per year.
The CSU has emphasized that bonuses and deferred compensation will be funded by non-state, non-tuition sources — including campus foundations and Associated Students, Inc. But critics note that base salary increases still draw in part from the general fund, and that the optics remain difficult to square with austerity elsewhere.
Pickrel, the Sacramento State lecturer, acknowledged the complexity. She said she understands that university budgets flow through separate channels and that president pay comes from different buckets than faculty salaries. But she said that explanation often falls flat.
“The university sometimes fails to think about the optics,” she said, “the way things look to people who don’t know how the budgeting and all of those systems work. And it’s not as transparent as it could be.”
Asked directly whether CSU presidents are overpaid, Pickrel declined to say. “I know that our president works hard,” she said. “And so I don’t really know that I have a good answer to that question.”
Wilde, the George Mason researcher, offered a similar assessment: “I think some of them probably are overpaid, particularly in some cases when you can look at what their bonuses are during the year.” But she added that CSU’s roughly $500,000 average base salary did not strike her as outrageous compared to the broader market.
Wilde also noted the role has changed dramatically. With public funding now as low as 15% to 20% of university budgets, presidents spend far more time fundraising and managing government relations than they did even a few years ago. “It’s become a much bigger job,” she said.
Berta-Avila says what remains unresolved is whether that market logic should govern a public university system that calls itself “the people’s university” and educates nearly half a million students, many of them first-generation and working-class.
“We talk about the CSU being the people’s university,” Berta-Ávila said. “But that is quickly transitioning to not being accountable to the communities it’s supposed to serve.”
CapRadio reporter Gerardo Zavala contributed reporting to this story.
Editor’s note: CapRadio is licensed to Sacramento State, which is also an underwriter.
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