A review of California’s community college payroll system has uncovered a small but striking group of instructors who are quietly collecting six-figure paychecks by teaching at multiple campuses simultaneously, including several who out-earned the presidents and chancellors who run the colleges.
The findings come from an in-depth data analysis conducted by CalMatters, which examined 2024 compensation records across the California Community Colleges system along with the California State University and University of California systems. Reporters identified at least 72 instructors who appeared on payroll at five or more districts or campuses that year. Ten of them earned more than $343,000 — surpassing the median pay for a community college president or chancellor during the same period.
The case that stood out most involved an instructor named Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal, who was on the books at 11 different college districts and university campuses. According to course catalog records, she was listed as the instructor for at least 69 course sections in 2024 alone, and her total compensation that year topped $793,000.
The analysis highlights a structural blind spot in how California’s community college system operates. Each of the state’s community college districts functions independently, with its own hiring practices and payroll systems. There is no centralized tracking mechanism that flags when an instructor is teaching simultaneously across multiple districts, nor any system designed to calculate an adjunct’s total course load system-wide. That means a single instructor could, in theory, be stacking dozens of sections across far-flung campuses without any single district knowing the full scope of what that person is teaching elsewhere.
To conduct the analysis, CalMatters relied on 2024 compensation data compiled by Transparent California, an organization affiliated with a nonpartisan, limited-government think tank that obtains public payroll records through records requests. Reporters used a computer-assisted matching process to identify payroll entries that likely belonged to the same person, grouping records with matching or near-matching names, then manually verified each case using course listings, faculty directories, LinkedIn profiles and hiring documents. Instructors identified in the analysis were contacted for comment; most did not respond, and some asked that their information not be published even though it came from public records.
After completing that work, CalMatters cross-checked the same instructors against payroll data from the CSU and UC systems, finding considerable overlap — evidence that some instructors are teaching simultaneously in the community college system and at four-year public universities.
The analysis does come with limitations. To keep the review manageable, CalMatters excluded name clusters built around extremely common surnames — including Garcia, Rodriguez, Gomez, Nguyen, Brown, Johnson and Smith — because there were simply too many payroll entries sharing those names to verify individually within a reasonable timeframe. That means there could be additional instructors teaching across five or more campuses whose records weren’t captured in this review.
Reporters also noted that payroll data reflects compensation paid in a given year, not necessarily coursework taught that same year, since pay can lag behind teaching assignments by a term or more. Additionally, name variations proved to be a complicating factor: the top earner identified in the analysis, Ninh Villarreal, appeared under five different name variations across her 11 employers, raising the possibility that other instructors’ full teaching loads were undercounted due to similar inconsistencies in how their names were recorded from campus to campus.
CalMatters noted it used artificial intelligence tools to assist with portions of the data analysis, with all code and findings reviewed manually by members of its data team. The full analysis and underlying data have been made publicly available for independent review.
Original source: CalMatters
