In recent years people have bemoaned the sky-high compensation of corporate CEOs. They have also expressed dismay over the rising cost of a college education. The rich get richer while the average folks have to fork over more for things that used to cost much less. Looking into this issue, Bloomberg News created a table that compared the annual compensation for the highest paid CEO in each of the 50 states and used it to answer the question: “For how many students in that state would that pay fund a four-year college education.”
At one end of the spectrum was California and New York where the CEOs of Oracle (Larry Ellison) and the Blackstone Group (Stephen Schwarzman) each made $225 million in 2015. Those salaries would have paid for more than 6,000 students to go to college for four full years in each of those states.
At the other end of the spectrum was Vermont where the CEO of Casella Waste Systems John Casella earned a mere (relatively speaking) $4.6 million, which would have paid for only 74 students to attend a four-year college in Vermont. This was, by far, the lowest of the 50 states—and the only one where the CEO’s salary would fund less than 100 students. Even West Virginia (161 students) and Montana (157)—the only states with less than 200—were more than double. In fact, in more than half of the states the CEO’s pay would fund more than 1,000 students’ education. In more than a political sense, Vermont truly is an egalitarian place.
Source: Wei Lu and Anders Melin, “A 50-State Look at U. S. CEO Pay Compared With Tuition Expenses,” Bloomberg.com, July 13, 2016. Available online at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-13/a-50-state-look-at-u-s-ceo-pay-compared-with-tuition-expenses?bcomANews=true