Higher Education "Performance"

InsiderHigherEd.com has a story today about a growing trend in college president compensation, whereby pay is linked to "performance." Not a bad idea per se -- I'm certainly among those who think that K-12 teacher pay should be linked to perforamnce. But then the article describes the performance measures being used:

These payments aren’t just bonuses for a good year, but are tied to specific metrics. [A compensation consultant] said he has seen incentives based on increases in the applicant pool or in SAT averages, progress in recruiting faculty talent, growth in endowments, successful completion of a fund raising campaign, and increases in graduation rates.

Another article also notes the reaction at Vanderbilt University to a recent WSJ story$ detailing the large compensation pacakage enjoyed by President E. Gordon Gee:

Gee enjoys immense popularity among students and faculty members at Vanderbilt where he has overseen the successful completion of a $1.25 billion fund-raising campaign two years ahead of schedule, a 50-percent spike in applications and corresponding increase in selectivity, a doubling in research funding, a tripling in financial aid for undergraduates, a 50-percent increase in minority enrollment, and a 100-point increase in average SAT scores. Gee has also personally involved himself in recruiting faculty members — and has helped attract stars, most recently in literary and African-American studies.

As these articles make clear, presidential performance in higher education is primarily defined by success in very specific areas: raising money, attracting a greater number of more academically qualified applicants, and boosting the university's standing in research and academia.

In other words, boosting institutional wealth, fame, and exclusivity. This shouldn't be a surprise--as a recent Education Sector paper notes, these are precisely the elements that drive the influential U.S. News college rankings. The rankings create an incentive structure, and universities respond in a rational way be aligning their resources and priorities accordingly.

What's left out of this equation is any measure of--and thus, focus on--education and learning that occurs in college. Presidents are being payed for higher student SAT scores. What other industry measures performance by what the customer brought with them when they walked in the front door?