Anger builds among unions and lawmakers over raises to CSU presidents
State lawmakers, unions and university staff have all railed against California State University leaders in recent months for making too much money.
The latest payroll data shows that nearly 150 CSU administrators were each paid more than $300,000 last year. Comparatively, the median pay for full-time CSU employees was $80,813, according to the State Controller’s Office.
The debate over how much university administrators should make, relative to staff and faculty, was intensified by recent raises for those at the top of the pay scale. The CSU Board of Trustees approved raises, ranging from 5% to 20%, for university presidents in November. Two months later, the board approved raises for vice chancellors who also rank near the top of the salary scale. In recent years, many of those administrators went without raises.
Meanwhile, the CSU system is still navigating a multi-billion dollar deficit and declined to award rank-and-file employees raises that they were previously scheduled to receive per a labor agreement. CSU said the withheld increases were due to budget cuts by the Legislature.
“It’s so tone-deaf to be giving massive salary increases and performance pay bonuses in the same budget that you have a multi-billion dollar deficit, in the same budget that you are cutting classes and cutting sections and raising tuition,” Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, D-Sunnyvale, said in an interview.
A proposal to peg top salaries to 125% of governor’s pay
Assembly Bill 1831 would cap CSU administrators’ pay at $307,000 — 125% of the governor’s salary — and reverse the pay increases that university leaders received in November. Ahrens’ bill would additionally prohibit the CSU from giving administrators a raise while also increasing tuition. In 2023, CSU’s board approved five consecutive years of 6% raises to tuition.
“This does nothing to help …. with student achievement,” Ahrens said of the raises. “This does only one thing, which is to help already highly paid administrators make even more money.”
The Office of the Chancellor explained the raises by saying that CSU leaders’ compensation has fallen behind other public university systems nationwide. A failure to increase presidents’ pay would result in “leadership instability,” stated a document outlining why the salary increases were necessary.
“With the recent salary adjustments for some presidents, the CSU sought to bring total compensation closer to (not above) the market median while maintaining fiscal sustainability,” CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said in a statement. Between 2021 and 2024, executives only received a single 7% salary increase, Bentley-Smith noted.
Bentley-Smith said that over the past four years, the university system has spent more than $770 million on salary increases for faculty and staff. The CSU spent hundreds of millions more to offset increasing health benefits costs, Bentley-Smith said.
Ahrens rejected the idea that the CSU needed to increase executive pay to attract new leaders. He said there are talented individuals who would accept these prestigious roles without the higher salaries. “They don’t need to be getting rich on the backs of the taxpayers,” he said.
Ahrens joined the Assembly in 2024. According to CalMatter’s Digital Democracy tool, his voting history closely aligns with positions of labor groups representing CSU staff and faculty such as the California Faculty Association.
Two CSU trustees support union’s position
Objection to these pay increases was a rallying cry during a recent strike by one labor union representing plumbers, electricians and other skilled trade workers across the CSU’s 22 campuses. Teamsters Local 2010 conducted a four-day strike last week over raises CSU denied workers due to budget cuts. The strike garnered support from several high-profile elected officials including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and State Treasurer Fiona Ma. Kounalakis and Thurmond are CSU trustees.
“They keep increasing the presidents’ pay, the chancellors’ pay, yet they want to try and say they don’t have the money to afford what they agreed to,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said at a rally at San Francisco State University.
The Teamsters organized strikes across the state, including in Fresno and Sacramento. The CSU trustees approved a 10% raise for Fresno State president Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval last year that increased his base pay to $523,617. Sacramento State President Luke Wood’s salary rose by 6% to $504,799 after the board vote.
Bentley-Smith said the increases to executives’ base pay would cost $700,000. She said that the 2025-26 salary increases for employees represented by the Teamsters and the California State University Employees Union would have cost approximately $70 million. A spokesperson for Teamsters Local 2010 said the raises the union’s members were supposed to receive last July would have cost $5 million.
“The CSU is committed to compensating all of our employees in a manner that is fair, reasonable, competitive, and fiscally prudent and evaluates that based on periodic market comparison surveys,” she said. The CSU is in the process of conducting a market analysis of staff to ensure the university system’s salaries are equitable, Bentley-Smith said.
Loren Cannon, the secretary for the California Faculty Association that represents 29,000 CSU staff and faculty members, described the raises for university administrators as a “maldistribution” of state resources.
Cannon, a philosophy lecturer at Cal Poly Humboldt, questioned why the university system’s highest paid employees were getting pay increases while CSU staff are struggling to afford housing and healthcare.
“The structure of the CSU right now, it just seems like an injustice with regard to California taxpayer money,” Cannon said. “The CSU is for educating Californians and has been a bedrock of that for decades. And now all the money’s being slurped up at the top.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Anger builds among unions and lawmakers over raises to CSU presidents."
