{"id":201810,"date":"2026-08-30T10:51:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201810"},"modified":"2026-08-30T12:48:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T20:48:31","slug":"prageru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201810","title":{"rendered":"PragerU Salaries & Bonuses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prager University Foundation raised $76.57 million in 2025 and closed the year with $105.50 million in net assets. Contributions run about 95 percent of revenue. The foundation pays its chief executive more than a million dollars a year, has paid the founder\u2019s company $3,573,626 since 2015, and pays the founder\u2019s son more than half a million dollars a year. Those figures come off the e-filed returns, which anyone can pull from ProPublica\u2019s Nonprofit Explorer<\/a>. <\/p>\n

2012<\/a> 2013<\/a> 2015<\/a> 2016<\/a> 2018<\/a> 2019<\/a> 2020<\/a> 2022<\/a>2023<\/a> 2024<\/a> 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

Marissa Streit was recruited by Dennis Prager and Allen Estrin to help launch the project, and PragerU now says she took the helm in 2011. The federal filings tell a slower story. The 2013 and 2015 returns list Allen Estrin as chief executive officer and Streit as chief operating officer, and Estrin signed both returns over the printed word President while the same documents named him CEO in Part VII. Item F of the 2013 return gives him as principal officer. Streit becomes principal officer and chief executive with the 2016 return. Public leadership and filing title are two different records at this organization, and the gap between them runs through everything that follows.<\/p>\n

Her base has sat near $738,000 since 2022, at $737,361 that year and $738,851 in 2024. On top of that comes a bonus the returns describe as based on annual revenues, estimated and accrued by December 31 and reconciled after the audit. The bonus was zero in 2019 and zero in 2020. Then $94,500 in 2021, $211,321 in 2022, $168,354 in 2023, $249,999 in 2024 and $249,999 in 2025. Her reportable compensation was $988,850 in 2024 and her total package $1,022,373, rising to $1,031,315 in 2025. The identical $249,999 figures in consecutive years point to a ceiling of $250,000. The returns do not disclose one, and an earlier version of this arrangement did.<\/p>\n

Candid, which publishes the standard reference on this question, drew its 2024 compensation report<\/a> from the 2022 filings of more than 128,000 tax-exempt organizations. Among nonprofits with budgets above $50 million, median compensation ran $559,770 for male chief executives and $430,640 for female ones. The Chronicle of Philanthropy<\/a> reported the full spread in that budget band: roughly $237,000 at the tenth percentile and above $1.5 million at the ninetieth. Streit sits in the upper stretch of that band, inside it.<\/p>\n

Sal Khan founded Khan Academy, which does what PragerU does in a different key, free instructional video at scale. Khan Academy spent about $87.5 million in 2025 and Khan drew $871,000, according to an analysis of the filings<\/a> by Class Central. Turning Point USA reported $85 million in revenue and paid Charlie Kirk about $390,000 in 2023, per Forbes<\/a>. The Heritage Foundation, which holds $413.8 million in assets, paid president Kevin Roberts $953,920 in 2023, including a bonus of $300,300, as CharityWatch<\/a> read out of Schedule J.<\/p>\n

So PragerU pays its chief executive more than the Heritage Foundation pays its president, more than Khan Academy pays the man whose name is on it, and more than twice what Turning Point USA paid its founder. It also pays her within the going rate for a nonprofit of its size.<\/p>\n

Scale it against the money coming in. Streit\u2019s package equals 1.35 percent of 2025 revenue. Khan\u2019s equals about 1 percent of Khan Academy\u2019s spending. Kirk\u2019s equaled about half a percent of Turning Point\u2019s. That range is where large advocacy and education nonprofits live. Her own share has been falling as the organization grows. She took $205,000 against $5.34 million of revenue in 2016, which is 3.8 percent. In 2018 it was 2.1 percent. In 2025, 1.35 percent. The dollars rise and the fraction shrinks.<\/p>\n

The staff grew faster than any of it. The number of people at PragerU receiving more than $100,000 in reportable compensation, a figure that sits on the last line of Part VII Section A, ran one in 2012, one in 2013, two in 2015, two in 2016, five in 2018, eight in 2019, twenty-one in 2020, thirty-six in 2022, forty-one in 2023, sixty-one in 2024 and eighty-one in 2025. A charity that ran out of a kitchen now supports a six-figure managerial class the size of a mid-market television network\u2019s.<\/p>\n

David Prager is chief development officer and Dennis Prager\u2019s son. PragerU identifies him by that title on its own site<\/a>. His total compensation ran $398,536 in 2020, $444,474 in 2021, $442,845 in 2022, $432,396 in 2023, $459,736 in 2024 and $523,616 in 2025. The 2024 Schedule J breaks that year into $385,041 of base and a $25,000 bonus. In 2020 the return listed him as vice president for development. Before he came on payroll his firm Palm Tree Consulting received $155,700 in 2018 and $38,700 in 2019, both disclosed on Schedule L with the family relationship stated. Development chiefs are the best-paid non-chief-executive officers at large nonprofits, and PragerU turns donor cultivation into 95 percent of its income. Half a million dollars against $76.57 million raised is 0.68 percent of the money the job exists to bring in. The rate fits the job description. How a founder\u2019s son moved from an outside related-party consulting arrangement onto the payroll, what process governed the hire, and what comparables the board used are questions the filings do not answer.<\/p>\n

Then Kansas and Brooklyn, the company Dennis Prager owns, received $150,000 in 2015, $200,000 in 2016, $250,000 in 2017, $237,500 in 2018, $301,667 in 2019, $382,913 in 2020, $462,083 in 2021, $493,333 in 2022, $375,000 in 2023, $446,130 in 2024 and $275,000 in 2025. Total, $3,573,626. Average, $324,875 a year. As a share of revenue it fell from 4.2 percent in 2015 to 0.36 percent in 2025. Prager is the voice, the face, the name and the founding argument of the organization. Nothing about $325,000 a year for that would raise an eyebrow if it appeared as salary on a line marked salary.<\/p>\n

PragerU\u2019s own returns show what it pays for on-camera talent. In 2019 the top-five contractor table lists Candace Owens as presenter and show host at $445,626. Kansas and Brooklyn received $301,667 that year. The founder\u2019s company came in below the market rate the organization was paying inside its own house.<\/p>\n

It does not appear as salary. The returns describe it as compensation for consulting services performed by Dennis Prager, paid to an entity he owns. Whether that should be understood as salary, a consulting arrangement, compensation for the use of his name and archives, or some combination cannot be determined from the return, because the public description never gets more specific than consulting services. For 2015, 2016 and 2017 it showed up only as a line in the top-five independent contractor table, with the organization answering No to the Form 990 question about business transactions with interested persons and filing no Schedule L. The disclosure begins with the 2018 return, the same year Prager first appears in Part VII as President and Founder.<\/p>\n

That non-disclosure had a consequence in print. On August 22, 2019 the Los Angeles Times reported that PragerU\u2019s growth had been lucrative for Prager, who it said had started collecting fees from the charity the previous year, and that filings showed $237,500 going to his consulting firm and $155,700 to his son. By then Kansas and Brooklyn had taken $837,500 across four years. The paper read the first Schedule L, saw a related-party disclosure appear for the first time, and drew the reasonable inference that the arrangement was new. Streit was quoted in the same passage calling what Prager makes \u201cnegligible,\u201d<\/a> and adding that in a for-profit he would earn far more, because the organization is driven by impact. That year the foundation paid her $397,864, about 1.7 times what it paid his company. The Center for Media and Democracy<\/a> published the four-year sequence five months later.<\/p>\n

Money paid to an employee lands in Part VII Section A with a title, an hours figure and a compensation column, and once it passes the threshold it lands again on Schedule J broken into base, bonus, other, deferred and nontaxable benefits. Money paid to a contractor lands in Part VII Section B as a name, an address, a phrase and a single number. For three years that single number was all a reader got.<\/p>\n

Paying a media performer through a corporation he owns is ordinary. Actors, hosts and writers have used loan-out corporations for decades. The performer sells his services to several buyers, the corporation collects the fees, and it pays him a salary while carrying his retirement plan and his business expenses. Under subchapter S he can split the income between salary and distribution and lower his self-employment tax. The buyer skips payroll tax, benefits and workers compensation and writes one check against an invoice. The regulations<\/a> make the corporate wrapper less important than it looks. Section 4958 asks whether an exempt organization has provided an excessive economic benefit to a disqualified person directly or indirectly, all consideration exchanged between the parties is taken into account, and the rules apply whether or not the amount is determined by the organization\u2019s revenues. The question is what PragerU received for what it paid.<\/p>\n

The 2020 return is where three things move at once. The Schedule L description changes from consulting services performed by Dennis Prager, founder and president, to consulting services performed by Dennis Prager, co-founder. Prager disappears from Part VII and has not reappeared through 2025. And the Schedule O explanation of how pay gets set, which in 2019 covered the chief executive and executive director, becomes determining compensation for the chief executive officer, executive director and founder. The board says it sets the founder\u2019s compensation in the same return in which it stops listing him as an officer.<\/p>\n

Follow the checkbox that carries the disclosure. Every return from 2018 through 2025 answers No to line 28a and Yes to line 28c, the question about an entity 35 percent owned by a person described in 28a. From the 2019 form onward, line 28a names creators and founders by those words. Since Prager left Part VII after 2019, founder status is the only category that can be carrying the Yes. PragerU has reached Schedule L through founder status for six straight years. That is the same status the Schedule L instructions<\/a> already listed in 2015, 2016 and 2017, when the organization answered No. The printed checkbox on the face of the return in those years named only officers, directors, trustees and key employees, so a preparer had a narrow reading available. Two readings of the same form existed. PragerU took the narrow one, the IRS closed the gap, and PragerU began disclosing two years before the form changed.<\/p>\n

The bonus arrangements have their own chronology, and it runs in three acts. In 2016 both senior executives were paid flat. Allen Estrin, co-founder, listed as executive director at thirty hours a week, took $200,000 with no bonus. Streit took $205,000, also flat. Schedule J that year answered No to the question about pay contingent on revenues.<\/p>\n

Two years later the answer is Yes and the formula is written down. The 2018 Schedule J says Streit receives 1.25 percent of fundraising with an annual amount not to exceed $400,000, and that chief marketing officer Craig Strazzeri receives 0.9 percent of online fundraising. The organization answered Yes to the revenue-contingent line and No to the non-fixed payment line, which is consistent, since a percentage set by contract with a stated ceiling counts as a fixed formula under the instructions for Schedule J<\/a>. The regulation agrees. One example<\/a> describes a performing arts chief executive paid a base plus 2 percent of season subscription sales above a threshold and calls the bonus a fixed payment, because nobody exercises discretion in calculating it.<\/p>\n

Do the arithmetic on that year and a question falls out. A bonus of $122,864 at 1.25 percent implies a fundraising base near $9.83 million. Total revenue was $18.60 million. So the word fundraising in her contract covers something narrower than everything the organization took in, and the return never defines it. Strazzeri\u2019s $23,715 at 0.9 percent implies online fundraising near $2.64 million.<\/p>\n

Act two is the shutdown. The 2019 Schedule J says Strazzeri received bonuses based on levels of online fundraising and that the structure was discontinued as of December 2019. Streit is not mentioned in that year\u2019s explanation at all, and her bonus is zero. In the 2020 return the revenue-contingent line is answered No, her bonus is zero again, and her base jumps to $497,998. The organization ran a year with no revenue-linked executive pay of any kind.<\/p>\n

Act three is the replacement, and it arrives without a published formula. By the 2022 return the revenue line is Yes again and Streit\u2019s bonus is $211,321 on a base of $737,361. The explanation says she receives bonuses based upon revenues raised annually, that the compensation committee considers reasonableness while using compensation studies, and that the committee also reviews each year\u2019s bonus before it is paid out. A second entry says bonuses for everyone other than the chief executive are discretionary, that she discusses the level with the committee, who approve, and that she makes the final determination as to performance. One and a quarter percent of 2025 revenue would exceed $950,000. Her bonus came in at $249,999. Whatever replaced the 2018 formula, the returns do not state it.<\/p>\n

The review-before-payout sentence sits awkwardly next to the checkboxes. A fixed payment requires that no person exercise discretion in calculating the amount or in deciding whether to pay it. Every return from 2022 forward describes a committee reviewing the bonus before it goes out, and the non-fixed payment line is answered No in 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and Yes only in 2022. On the same schedule, the box for a written employment contract is left unchecked every year.<\/p>\n

Two more names. Layne Thrasher, chief financial officer, took a base of $349,517 and a bonus of $116,000 in 2024, for $497,870 in all, with bonuses of $31,000 in 2023 and $110,000 in 2025. Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer, took bonuses of $33,000, then $77,000, then $100,000 across the same years. The 2023 Schedule O explained that a minority portion of their year-end bonuses is tied to annual revenues. That sentence is gone from the 2024 and 2025 returns, in the same stretch where both bonuses roughly tripled. Schedule J still discloses their base and total, so the disappearance is of the explanation rather than the money.<\/p>\n

Something else went quiet. The line asking whether any compensation is contingent on net earnings is answered No in 2019 and 2022 and Yes in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2023 return explains it: the organization trialed a year-end bonus to staff, with no officers included, based on PragerU net earnings. In 2024 and 2025 the answer stays Yes and the explanation is gone, though the form instructs that a Yes be described. The same schedule discloses that C-level employees occasionally use first-class travel on long or red-eye flights and that the value is not included in their taxable compensation.<\/p>\n

Revenue-linked pay to insiders is the part of this with a body of law behind it, and the law cuts both ways. Section 4958 does not forbid it. It asks whether the total is reasonable. A charity earns a rebuttable presumption<\/a> of reasonableness when a conflict-free body approves the arrangement in advance, obtains appropriate comparability data first, and documents the basis contemporaneously. The regulation is specific about the data. One example holds that a board relying solely on a national survey of university president pay, undivided by revenue, size or geography, has not obtained appropriate comparability data. Another example, running the other way, lets a board keep relying on the prior year\u2019s independent survey once it determines that market conditions have not changed materially, so the 2025 return citing a September 2024 study is unremarkable. A third provision covers exactly this shape of arrangement, a capped bonus, and requires that the comparability data support the maximum payable counting base and bonus together.<\/p>\n

PragerU cites compensation studies dated November 2018, November 2020, November 2022 and September 2024, and names neither the preparer nor the peer group. The timing invites a question the returns cannot answer. Streit\u2019s base rose from roughly $575,000 in 2021 to $737,361 in 2022, and the study PragerU cites for that period is dated November 2022. The regulation requires the data before the determination. Which came first is in the minutes and nowhere else. Schedule J checks a box for an independent compensation consultant every year. Schedule O describes a professional and independent search firm. Those are different vendors doing different work, and neither is named.<\/p>\n

The board has been shrinking through all of it, from ten voting members in 2017 and 2018 to nine, then seven, then eight, and five in 2025.<\/p>\n

One sentence in the returns changed in a way California law makes checkable. Through the 2022 return, Schedule O told readers that the foundation\u2019s governing documents, including its bylaws, audited financial statements, federal Forms 990 and conflict of interest policy, are available to the public on request. From the 2023 return the audited financial statements are dropped from that list. Government Code section 12586(e) requires California charities above $2 million in revenue to prepare audited statements and make them available to the public.<\/p>\n

Where the money goes is no mystery. The top of the contractor table is advertising. Facebook and Google took a combined $6.8 million in 2019 and $20.4 million in 2025, with Fox News Network, X Corp, EKF Promotions, Givingtons and HSP Direct filling out the lists.<\/p>\n

A hundred and five million dollars in net assets sounds like a war chest. Against $76.57 million of annual revenue it comes to about seventeen months of operating money, which sits inside what charity analysts treat as prudent.<\/p>\n

The headline compensation figures are not self-evidently outside the range large nonprofits produce. What invites investigation is the structure behind them: a chief executive whose bonus is tied to revenue under a formula the public cannot see, a founder paid for more than a decade through his own corporation for services the returns never describe, a son who moved from related-party consultant to highly paid development chief, and compensation studies the filings invoke and never disclose.<\/p>\n

The filings create an odd asymmetry. We know what the board wants the government to know, that outside experts and studies were used, that the committee approved the arrangements, that the amounts were treated as reasonable. We do not know the peer institutions, the formula now in force, the terms of the Kansas and Brooklyn contract, the services delivered under it, or the minutes recording who recused. Those are the facts that would let an outsider reproduce the board\u2019s conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prager University Foundation raised $76.57 million in 2025 and closed the year with $105.50 million in net assets. Contributions run about 95 percent of revenue. The foundation pays its chief executive more than a million dollars a year, has paid … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dennis-prager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201810"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201839,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201810\/revisions\/201839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}