Real Faculty Wages Decline for Third Straight Year

Any recent gains in salary for full-time faculty members have been swallowed up by soaring inflation. That’s the main takeaway from the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2022-23, recently released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Full-time faculty saw a 4% bump for the year ending fall 2022, the largest single-year gain since 1991. But skyrocketing inflation caused a 2.4% drop in real wages, the third straight sharp decline, for a cumulative loss of 7.5%

The report is based on data from a survey of nearly 900 US colleges and institutions, who provided information on more than 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members. Participants came from a wide variety of institutional types, including doctoral universities, regional schools, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and minority-serving institutions.

The survey found a wide range of average salaries for full-time faculty, from $42,050 for unranked faculty members at associate’s institutions with ranking systems to $218,005 for full professors at private-independent doctoral institutions. However, the real earnings of professors of all ranks went down when compared to the change in the Consumer Price Index, which was 6.5%. According to Dr. Melissa Fuesting, senior survey researcher for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR), the pandemic cannot be solely to blame.

Dr. Melissa Fuesting, senior survey researcher for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources“This was a pattern that was going on before the pandemic and is continuing on after the pandemic,” she said, noting that tenure-track faculty haven’t received a raise that met or exceeded inflation since 2016.

“It’s really clear that faculty’s main opportunity for a meaningful pay raise basically only comes around at promotion time,” Fuesting said. “For faculty, that only happens maybe twice in their career, when they go from assistant to associate, and from associate to full.”

Finances are more difficult for those lower on the food chain. Part-time faculty that are paid on a per-course basis got a boost that was just shy of a percentage point, although there has been a nearly 9% increase since the 2019-20 year. On average, they earned $3,874 per course section.

Dr. Rebecca Givan, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Center for Work and Health, called the raise insignificant.