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When former President Judith Rodin left Penn for the Rockefeller Foundation last year, her farewell celebrations included a hefty pay hike.

Rodin earned almost $100,000 more in her last year at Penn than she did in the previous year, bringing her total salary up to $986,915, according to recently released Internal Revenue Service documents.

The additional $93,702 she earned from July 1, 2003, to June 30, 2004, was part of a trend of increasingly high salaries for Penn's top administrators, according to Vice President for Human Resources Jack Heuer.

While Heuer refused to comment specifically on Rodin's compensation, he said that the pattern of rising salaries is "not only performance-driven, but market-driven."

Rodin's salary in her last year included more than $300,000 in benefits and deferred compensation -- money Rodin was awarded after achieving internal goals in areas like fundraising and faculty recruitment.

Rodin was the second-highest-paid private university president in the United States in fiscal year 2003, during which she earned $893,213, only falling behind Johns Hopkins University President William Brody.

Rodin was the only Ivy League president to make the list of the top 10 highest-paid private university presidents in that fiscal year.

Rankings are not yet available for university presidents' compensation for fiscal year 2004, which ended in June.

Although information on current President Amy Gutmann's compensation in her first year at Penn will only be public next year, some experts estimate that she is earning less than Rodin did in her final year.

Washington lawyer Raymond Cotton -- who specializes in presidential contracts -- said because Gutmann was an academic officer at Princeton University before coming to Penn, her first-year salary is likely lower than Rodin's was.

"The responsibilities that a president have are enormously different" from those of a provost, Cotton said. "Until [Gutmann] establishes a track record as the president of Penn," she will probably be paid less than Rodin.

With Rodin's annual earnings often the highest in the Ivy League, skyrocketing presidential salaries are a hot topic for the Executive Compensation Committee of the Board of Trustees -- the group responsible for setting the president's and top administrators' salaries.

The committee meets up to six times a year, when it determines "strategic objectives and priorities" for each University official, Heuer said.

Salary increases, Heuer added, depend in part on whether Penn employees meet those goals.

But the committee also works to ensure that University officials earn what they could if they were not employed by Penn. Using confidential data from private universities' executive compensation survey and other information about comparable salaries in non-education industries, the committee aims to set deans' and officers' salaries between the 50th and 75th percentile of what they could earn in the private sector.

"Most of the Penn administrators could make much more money if they worked in private industry," University spokeswoman Lori Doyle said. "We pay what we need to pay in an intensely competitive market in order to attract" prospective employees.

And according to Cotton, Rodin's chart-topping salary was justified because she could have been making more money elsewhere.

"Given the responsibilities that a university president has, I would argue that relative to other major administrators in the [nonprofit] world, they are relatively underpaid," he said.

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