If you had to guess who the highest-earning coach was last year in the State System of Higher Education, you’d probably be very wrong; it’s former IUP softball coach William Graham.
That information comes from PennLive.com’s annual analysis of the highest-earning state-paid employees in Pennsylvania. Graham earned $227,648 in 2018, including his salary, a $156,959 buyout of his contract, $44,143 in a Cobra insurance payment, and $619 in unused leave.
PennLive says 9,071 employees earned over $100,000 in compensation from the state last year. The list is topped by James Grossman, the Chief Investment Officer of PSERS, the Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System. He was paid $413,388.
IUP president Michael Driscoll was the fourth-highest paid state employee, with a salary and benefits package worth $388,148. Now-retired IUP administrator Rhonda Luckey was fifteenth in the state, at $340,076.
PennLive has been publishing its list since 1997. The website says about one in every ten state employees earned $100,000 or more in 2018, up from one in every thirteen the year before. That’s a nine percent increase. The number of workers in the “$100,000 Club” has grown by eighteen percent since Tom Wolf became governor in 2015.
