100 Highest-Paid Christian College And University Executives – 2024

7 of 10 are coaches; High Point U’s Nido Quebein is top paid president

Below is a list of 100 highly paid Christian college and university executives. The information was derived from the latest available Form 990 prepared by the ministry itself.

In years past, we have included the executives on this list in our annual list of “Highly Compensated Ministry Executives,” published Tuesday.  However, as our database has grown it became obvious that we had enough data for two lists that provide more of an “apples to apples” comparison.  Thus this second list.

A word about timing: This information comes from the most recent Form 990 available from the Internal Revenue Service. For most ministries, they come from the fiscal year 2022. Many colleges have June 30 fiscal year ends, but so far no FY 2023 Form 990s are available. The IRS has been slow in processing Form 990s for more than a year. (We have written about this backlog here.) This timing issue means that in a few cases we are showing salaries for people who no longer work at the institution. One example: Dondi Costin, who left Charleston Southern University to assume the presidency of Liberty University.

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Highlights

Here are a few highlights of this year’s list:

• Pepperdine University has the most executives on this list, with 19. Baylor is next with 14. Liberty University has 12 and Grand Canyon University has 10. All other schools have five or fewer executives on the list.
• Seven of the top 10 executives on this list are either coaches or (in one case) the athletic director.
• For the second year in a row, Nido Quebein of High Point University is the highest-paid college president. His salary tops $2 million. Right behind him is Linda Livingstone of Baylor. Her salary is $1.5 million, 25 percent less, even though Baylor is three times larger than High Point.
• Len Munsil of Arizona Christian University has the highest salary relative to the size of the institution he leads. His salary is 1.6 percent of the college’s revenue. By way of comparison, Nido Quebein’s $2.1 million salary is less than one-half of 1 percent of High Point’s revenue.

To see last year’s list of executives, click here.