By SUSAN JONES
Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel isn’t included in a Chronicle of Higher Education list of the base pay, bonuses and benefits for 180 chief executives at public doctoral universities and systems in 2024. It’s not that her salary doesn’t put her in the top 20, but Pitt was among more than 130 schools that did not provide information to the publication.
Gabel was hired in 2023 with a base pay of $950,000. She was not eligible for a raise in 2024, and for 2025 she asked that her 2.5% raise be added to the staff’s Compensation Modernization project. Salaries for Pitt senior leadership are for the calendar year and are generally set by the Board of Trustees at a meeting in mid-December.
If her salary was on the Chronicle’s list, Gabel’s base pay for 2024 would put her 17th among the highest-paid public university leaders (among those who provided information). That’s just ahead of Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi, who made a base salary of $935,731 that year.
The Penn State board of trustees last month gave Bendapudi a 47% raise to $1.4 million with 3.5% increases each year. This would put her salary around the same as Jay Hartzel at the University of Texas at Austin, who leads the Chronicle list. It also comes at a time when Penn State is planning to close seven of its branch campuses.
None of these numbers reflect bonuses and other pay received by school leaders. For instance, West Virginia University’s E. Gordon Gee had a base pay of $794,846 for 2024 and a bonus of $1.2 million, which put him second on the list for total pay. Leading the list was Renu Khator of the University of Houston, who received just over $1 million in base pay, a $300,000 bonus and $1.8 million in other pay, which is possibly deferred retention and other bonuses but the list doesn’t specify.
Gabel also has a retention bonus in her package that will pay $1 million — five annual $200,000 deferred retention-incentive payments — if she stays at Pitt until June 30, 2029.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.