Are College Presidents Like Football Coaches? Evidence from Their Employment Contracts

College presidents and football coaches are frequently criticized for their high compensation. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms are unmerited, as the markets for both college presidents and football coaches exhibit properties consistent with a competitive labor market. Both parties’ compensation varies in sensible ways related to the size of the programs they manage, as well as their potential for value creation. Successful college presidents and football coaches can greatly increase the value of their schools well beyond the amount they receive in compensation. If these higher education executives’ compensation is the result of a competitive labor market, and they do not capture compensation in excess of the incremental value they create, the overall welfare of their universities is increased. To shed light on these issues, we engaged in a comprehensive examination and comparison of college president and football coach compensation levels and employment contracts across FBS Division I universities. We found a number of noteworthy results. First, we see large differences in job tenure of these two groups: university presidents stay in their jobs significantly longer than football coaches. Second, we observe that football coaches are paid significantly more and their pay is rising at a much faster rate than college presidents. Third, larger schools pay these top executives much more than their smaller counterparts, especially for football coaches. Furthermore, Power Five conference schools pay their coaches far more than the other football conferences. Finally, we note significant differences in the structure of the college presidents’ employment contracts compared to football coaches’ contracts. For each of these major findings, we provide a detailed analysis of why they existand how they can be explained by economic theory. football coaches, college presidents, competitive labor market, job tenure, employment contracts, compensation, severance payment

College Football Coaches\u27 Pay and Contracts: Are They Overpaid and Unduly Privileged?

College football coaches\u27 employment contracts and compensation garner public attention and scrutiny in much the same way as those of corporate CEOs. In both cases, the public perception is that they must be overpaid and pampered Economic theory claims that for coaches and CEOs to be overpaid, they must be receiving compensation in excess of the value they create for their organizations. However, both receive pay-for-performance compensation, which structurally aligns their compensation with value creation. This means we need to examine the underlying structure of the contract that gives rise to the observed compensation to determine whether they are appropriately compensated. We compare the employment contracts of Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) college football coaches with those ofcorporate CEOs during the period 2005 to 2013. We find that coaches are not overpaid, and their contracts are fairly drawn. We also show that CEO and coach contracts exhibit many common features. These contract features are consistent with what economic theory would predict

Families of contact 3-manifolds with arbitrarily large Stein fillings

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz and Ozbagci. To produce our examples, we set a framework which generalizes the construction of Stein structures on allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk to those over any orientable base surface, along with the construction of contact structures via open books on 3-manifolds to spinal open books introduced in [24].Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures, with an appendix by Samuel Lisi and Chris Wend

Observation of Three-dimensional Long-range Order in Smaller Ion Coulomb Crystals in an rf Trap

Three-dimensional long-range ordered structures in smaller and near-spherically symmetric Coulomb crystals of ^{40}Ca^+ ions confined in a linear rf Paul trap have been observed when the number of ions exceeds ~1000 ions. This result is unexpected from ground state molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, but found to be in agreement with MD simulations of metastable ion configurations. Previously, three-dimensional long-range ordered structures have only been reported in Penning traps in systems of ~50,000 ions or more.Comment: 5 pages; 4 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett.; changed content