University of Hawaii President David Lassner’s salary last year ranked in the bottom third among 230 public college presidents, according to a new report by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The report, released Sunday, covers the fiscal year that started July 1, 2013. Because Lassner was appointed interim president on Sept. 1, 2013, his salary is listed as "partial-year compensation" at $270,840.

The figure reflects 10 months of pay at the $325,008 annual salary the UH Board of Regents approved for Lassner when naming him to the interim post. At the prorated salary, Lassner’s base pay ranks No. 187 out of 227 university presidents in the report.

Lassner had been the university’s longtime information technology executive before being tapped to lead the 10-campus UH system, which has 60,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff members, and more than $1.5 billion in annual operating expenses.

The salary report covers leaders from 220 public universities, including presidents whose tenures began or ended during the 2014 fiscal year. Base salaries ranged from a high of $752,160 for the head of the University of Texas system, which enrolls more than 214,000 students, to a low of $105,465 for the interim president of Florida State University.

Overall, the typical public college president earned an average of just over $428,000 last fiscal year, an increase of about 7 percent over the year before. Median base pay was $400,000, and presidents on average made nearly four times more than their average full-time professors, the report found. (The median faculty salary at the flagship Manoa campus is $98,340, according to the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly.)

Randy Moore, chairman of the UH Board of Regents, said the board is sensitive to public concerns over highly compensated executives.

"The board has been for some time trying to be responsive to concerns that high-level university salaries have crept up everywhere," Moore told the Hono­lulu Star-Advertiser. "The salary for David Lassner is substantially less than his predecessor, and it was based on a desire to show it is possible to hire competent people for less money than we have been paying. That’s not to say they’re not worth it. And that’s not to say it is intentionally noncompetitive."

By comparison, Lassner’s predecessor, M.R.C. Greenwood, received a $475,000 salary at her hiring in 2009. Former UH-Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple, who was hired in 2012, was paid $439,008.

Moore acknowledged that smaller salaries could affect future recruiting efforts. He said the board has been trying to set salaries that are competitive but also emphasize public service.

"There are good people everywhere. University service is public service, and public servants are typically motivated to serve the public," he said. "We believe we can find competent people to do excellent work. They don’t need the highest salary."

Lassner’s salary has since increased. He served as interim president until last summer, when he emerged as the leading candidate for the permanent position. The regents appointed him president effective July 1, 2014, and increased his salary to $375,000.

At that level, Lassner would move up 60 spots to No. 127 on the Chronicle’s list — tied with the base salaries of the presidents of the University of Southern Mississippi and the nine-campus University of Louisiana system — but remains in the bottom half of salaries.

Unlike past UH presidents, Lassner, who holds a doctorate in communication and information sciences, said upon hiring that he would not seek a tenured faculty position to fall back on. He also declined to move into the university’s College Hill residence in Manoa and did not seek a housing allowance that past presidents were given as part of their benefits packages.

The salary report found that at more than half of the public universities surveyed, the president wasn’t the highest-paid person on campus. At those colleges the highest-paid employees were athletic coaches and medical faculty, with some in those groups earning more than $1 million.

The same holds true at the University of Hawaii. The highest-paid employees in the UH system are UH-Manoa head football coach Norm Chow, who receives a $550,000 base salary, and Dr. Jerris Hedges, dean of the John A. Burns School of Medicine, who makes $505,008.

The Chronicle does separately analyze the pay of private university leaders, based on filings with the IRS and U.S. Department of Education, but noted that public college compensation data are not directly comparable because the analyses include different categories of pay and different periods of time.

The typical private college president earned close to $400,000 in 2012, the most recent year for which full data are available.

That year, Hawaii Pacific University President Geoffrey Bannister received a compensation package worth $542,802, according to the nonprofit university’s IRS filing. Meanwhile, Cha­mi­nade University’s president, Bernard Ploe­ger, is not paid a university salary, according to the Catholic university’s tax reports.