[Update]: Sarah Lawrence College Issues Statement on President's Compensation

I am writing to correct certain errors that appeared in the December 19, 2013 issue of The Patch regarding SLC President Karen Lawrence and her 2011 compensation.

The headline incorrectly stated that President Lawrence is among the top 200 paid in the US. That is not accurate, as the comparative group is private colleges only. In fact, President Lawrence's compensation is 160th -- not third -- among the list of presidential compensation at the 550 private colleges surveyed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I also would like to point out that the reported total compensation includes her actual base salary of $341,140, which is relatively low compared to that of these 550 presidents.  More to the point, however, the reported compensation includes the value of the house in which she resides.  Sarah Lawrence College’s Board of Trustees requires President Lawrence to reside on campus in the president's house. The fact that Sarah Lawrence is located in Westchester County, where the value of housing is particularly high, causes this figure to be inflated compared to that of other college presidents.

Sarah Lawrence College President Karen Lawrence was the nation’s 160th highest paid president at a private college as of 2011, according The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual study.

Lawrence was named president of the Bronxville-based college in 2007, and was previously the Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. According to the college, Lawrence attended Smith College for two years and received her B.A. degree in English, magna cum laude, from Yale University, where she was among the first women to graduate from Yale when it became coeducational.

For 2011, Lawrence’s annual total compensation was $537,697, of which her base pay accounted for $341,140. The study, which breaks down the presidents into “comparison groups,” ranked Lawrence’s pay third among presidents at similar private colleges.

Lawrence is the 10th president in Sarah Lawrence's history.

The Chronicle’s study uses data from federal tax documents to rank compensation for the 2011 fiscal year – the most recent date of data that was available. It ranks 550 presidents, from University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, who tops the list making more than $3.3 million a year, to Saint Joseph’s University President Rev. Timothy Lannon, whose annual salary is undisclosed.

The study also provides the following “key takeaways” for Lawrence in regard to her comparison group:

• She made $97,756 less than the highest-paid president of a similar institution.

• The median pay for presidents in this peer group was $375,960.

To see the The Chronicle of Education’s entire list, click here.