Johns Hopkins president among America’s highest paid college leaders

Ron Daniels, the president of the Johns Hopkins University, earned $5,871,487 in 2024, new tax filings show, making the Baltimore institution’s longtime leader among the top-paid college presidents in the country.

Not all of that was Daniels’s take-home pay; it included millions of dollars in deferred compensation and retirement benefits, and his base salary changed little from the previous year. However, Daniels, who has led the university since 2009, earned a total of about 55% more than he did in 2023, largely from the payout of a retention bonus.

Among colleges that Hopkins considers its peers — Ivy League schools, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University, for example — only University of Pennsylvania President Larry Jameson made more, at just over $8 million.

Daniels’ compensation “reflects our continuing confidence in Ron and our desire to retain him in this critical role,” Jeffrey S. Barber, the chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, said in a statement.

“Ron is a transformational leader whose vision has positioned Hopkins to navigate well through this period of change in higher education, while continuing to set the standard for the American research university,” he said.

Since President Donald Trump took office last year, Hopkins has suffered losses of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants. Last spring, the university conducted the largest layoffs in its history, separating from more than 2,000 employees. The university laid off about 110 more employees last month and is in the midst of a hiring freeze.

Johns Hopkins, a private university, recently released Daniels’ earnings from the 2024 calendar year in its Form 990 for last fiscal year. The form requires nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations like Hopkins to annually report certain financial information, including executive compensation. Not all universities have released their 990s from last fiscal year.

Daniels’ pay was broken into a few categories: His base compensation was $1,630,672, not much more than the prior year. He made $300,000 in bonus and incentive compensation, $1,006,475 in his retirement account and $64,869 in nontaxable benefits, like health insurance. Daniels’ biggest take-home was $2,869,471 in “other reportable compensation,” which usually means deferred compensation. It more than tripled from the prior year.

Deferred compensation is when a university sets aside a certain amount of money each year that is to be paid out when a president serves the length of their contract. It is a multiyear retention tool to incentivize senior leaders to stay at an institution until they earn the lump sum.

Because Hopkins is a private university, Daniels’ contract is not publicly available. The university declined to share the contract with The Banner.

Daniels has had an unusually long tenure at Hopkins. In 2023, the American Council on Education found that the average tenure for a college president was 5.9 years. Daniels, on the other hand, has been president of Hopkins for 17 years, longer than the leaders at all its peer institutions.

“Often the feeling is you have to pay a president more in order to keep them,” said Judith Wilde, an academic who has studied presidential contracts for decades. “This is not a 40-hour-a-week job any more.”

Wilde, who recently retired from George Mason University, said that part of the reason college presidents have made more money in the last two decades is the makeup of their Boards of Trustees. Many boards, like the one at Hopkins, are filled with executives of large businesses who are accustomed to paying CEOs big dollars, she noted.

The job of a university president has also become more difficult — and politicized — in recent years. Leaders are expected to run their universities while college enrollment declines nationwide and funding, both at the state and federal levels, falls.

About 20 years ago, experts like Wilde and her research partner James Finkelstein began seeing more bonuses and perks creep into college president’s contracts. For Daniels, that includes a house and a $1,00,000 loan from the university taken out about 10 years ago, for “retention.” Details of that loan, including its purpose and interest rate, are not publicly available, and Hopkins officials did not answer questions about the nature of the loan.

Finkelstein said he suspects Daniels’ pay bump won’t be sustained in future years.

“My guess is that he met the requirements of his deferred compensation plan and was paid that money out,” he said. “Next year, my guess is there is going to be a lot less made.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.