My friend Kevin Hallock, who heads  Cornell University’s Institute for Compensation Studies (ICS), has an interesting short look at the world of pay in the non-profit sector in the US. Kevin is one of the leading experts in the field of pay and compensation studies  …  in a nutshell, he looks at how companies pay their employees (salary, per hour, stock options, incentives, piecework, etc.) and what they pay (comparisons across industries of total value, deferred bonuses, etc.)

What I find particularly interesting is Kevin’s comment that when he is teaching his courses on pay and compensation, he avoids the use of words such as “company” or “firm” for as long as he can because he wants to demonstrate to his students that basic principles of compensation apply to both the for- and non-profit sectors of the economy.

He has some interesting perspectives on the commonly-held presumptions surrounding pay in non-profits.