How we found the instructors making more than $400K at community colleges

In summary

Our analysis found 72 community college instructors who worked at five or more campuses in 2024, with 10 of them taking home more than $340,000 in pay.

CalMatters’ in-depth analysis of 2024 payroll data from the California Community Colleges system found records showing at least 72 instructors were on payroll at five or more community college districts or California State University/University of California campuses. Ten of the 72 instructors we identified earned more than $343,000, the median salary of a community college president or chancellor in the same year.

Each California community college district is independently governed, and no one tracks who teaches across districts or how many classes they teach. Community colleges have no way of knowing what an instructor’s full course load is. The top earner in our analysis was listed as the instructor for at least 69 course sections across nine community college districts, according to course catalog records from 2024 reviewed by CalMatters.

We also reviewed payroll data from the California State University and University of California systems and found many of the same instructors identified in our community college analysis.

Data collection

CalMatters used 2024 employee compensation data from Transparent California, part of a nonpartisan think tank advocating for limited government. Transparent California obtained the data directly from the colleges and universities using public records requests.

Data cleaning

CalMatters normalized job titles and names, removing non-alphabetic characters and standardizing letter case to lower in the compensation data.

Methodology

Our analysis relied on a computer algorithm grouping payroll records that shared highly similar names followed by CalMatters’ reporters verifying an employee’s identity and employment using publicly available records or confirmation from college press contacts. We contacted any instructors we identified as working at five or more college districts or university campuses.

Pay record clustering

The community college payroll records included name, campus, job title, total pay and benefits. We compared all payroll records that shared either a middle or surname. A pair of records were considered as a possible match if (1) they shared the same first name and (2) the remainder of the names were a perfect or near-perfect match, barring a single name and excluding initials. We grouped the matched pairs based on transitive relationships. 

For example, a group of names, which we refer to as a cluster, could contain pay records for Bob Smith, Bob J. Smith, Bob M. Smith, and Bob Williams Smith. The four records were grouped together because they all shared the same first name and last name with the record for “Bob Smith”. We built a single group because we couldn’t determine whether the plain “Bob Smith” was the same individual recorded in the remaining records based solely on payroll data.

We excluded 61 clusters that matched records solely based on sharing a very common name. (See: High frequency surnames excluded.) That left 272 clusters that were associated with payroll records for five or more college districts or university campuses.

Manual evaluation and validation

CalMatters manually reviewed the remaining 272 clusters and further grouped records that could reasonably represent a single instructor. We made these judgments by relying on name, title, employer, department and course subject.

We determined which payroll database entries represented a single instructor by independently verifying the named instructor’s relationship with the associated campus or district. We established this by locating at least one current or previous course listing at each school, a faculty directory profile, LinkedIn profile or college hiring documents. (See: Contract renewals.)  

We sent at least two emails to share our findings and request comments for each instructor who met our criteria, identifying instructors who taught at five or community college districts or university campuses. Most of the professors did not respond to CalMatters’ requests for comment. Others asked CalMatters not to publish the data, which is publicly available, for fear of how it might affect their employment.

California State University and University of California payroll records

After completing the manual evaluation and validation of the community college records, CalMatters ran a similar process with payroll records from California State University and University of California. We cross-referenced names in the validated community college data against records in the CSU and UC data that share a middle or surname. If there was a perfect or near-perfect match, then we ran the same manual evaluation and validation process to determine whether the CSU or UC record represented the same instructor we identified in the community college payroll data.

Findings

CalMatters found 72 instructors who were paid by five or more districts or university campuses in 2024. Median pay for those instructors was $191,000. The top earner, Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal, was found on payroll records for 11 college districts or university campuses, and earned more than $793,000 in 2024. She was the listed instructor for at least 69 course sections, according to course catalog archives we reviewed for the community colleges and universities where she was on payroll that year.

In total, we found 10 instructors, including Ninh Villarreal, who earned more than $343,000, the median salary of a community college president or chancellor in 2024.

Limitations

High frequency surnames excluded

We excluded candidate pairs where the match was based solely on a middle initial, middle name or surname that appeared 500 times or more  in the community college payroll data because we could not validate the individual records in a reasonable timespan. (See: Manual evaluation and validation.) This approach excluded 61 clusters from manual evaluation. Among the surnames were many of Spanish language origin, including Garcia, Rodriguez and Gomez, as well as the surnames Nguyen, Brown, Johnson and Smith. There could be other instructors from those clusters who taught at five or more college districts or university campuses but evaluating those records fell outside the scope of our analysis.

Validation limited to clusters with five or more records

We limited our analysis to instructors we suspected may have been employed at five or more districts or university campuses in 2024. This is not a comprehensive analysis of community college instructors teaching at multiple schools. 

Contract renewals

We used colleges’ searchable Fall 2026 class schedules as our primary source to confirm where an instructor taught. We used this as a proxy for teaching location in 2024 because the colleges we reviewed typically didn’t maintain archives of past class schedules. If the instructor was not listed in the Fall 2026 schedule, we reviewed other corroborating documentation. (See: Manual evaluation and validation.)

Teaching assignments may change from one academic term to the next, so the 2024 payroll data does not represent the definitive list of campuses where an instructor has taught. An instructor could have been paid in 2024 for a course taught in 2023. An instructor could be teaching at fewer or more schools in 2026 than they did in 2024.

Name changes or variations

We expected the payroll database to use employees’ legal names consistently across multiple schools, but we found instances where instructors we verified as the same person were listed under different name variations. For example: Thien-Huong Villarreal, the top earner on our list, had five different name variations across 11 different schools. This means there may be instances where our approach didn’t catch a name variation of an instructor.

The payroll data obtained by Transparent California is gathered on a year-to-year basis as reported to the Internal Revenue Service. If an instructor teaches at multiple districts or university campuses and changes their name between terms then their pay record will be updated at only the schools they are a returning instructor.

Note on AI-assisted work

We used AI coding tools to assist with the analysis. All code and results were manually reviewed by a member of our data team. You can access and download our analysis here.

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