Most of the 10 highest-paid presidents of private colleges in 2020 were leaders who have since left the role — including the disgraced former president of Liberty University, whose total compensation that year was $3.5 million.
Jerry L. Falwell Jr., in his final year at the university, was the fifth-highest-paid private-college leader, according to The Chronicle’s analysis of private nonprofit institutions. Roughly a quarter of Falwell’s total compensation was his base pay; most of the rest was severance pay from the university.
Falwell was one of 80 private-college leaders who earned $1 million or more in the 2020 calendar year. The data, compiled from the Internal Revenue Service’s Form 990, cover 307 presidents and chancellors at 283 colleges with expenditures of $100 million or more.
Who were the top earners, and who got the biggest raises? To learn more about these and other questions, see below. To see all the presidents in our analysis go to chronicle.com/compensation/