What Professors Actually Earn
It’s no secret that the cost of living has risen markedly in recent years as inflation has soared. Faculty members, whose bumps in pay have not always kept up with these broader increases in cost, have also felt the squeeze.
The peculiar nature of faculty careers can also play a role. Those fortunate enough to land a tenured position might find themselves rooted in place for decades as economic forces buffet them. And for those off the tenure track, pay often falls well below a livable wage.
The Chronicle wondered: Is the American dream still alive for faculty members?
We embarked on a project examining faculty members’ pay, and how purchasing power is affected by the cost of living, according to a county-by-county index. Our interactive tool shows how pay stacks up across faculty rank, county, state, and peer institutions. To understand how those numbers play out in the lives of real people, we spoke with seven instructors across the country about how they make ends meet.
There’s no single answer to the question of whether the American dream is still alive for faculty members, but here are a few top findings from our analysis, which is drawn from salary and institution data from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey for the 2022-23 academic year and combined with the Council for Community and Economic Research’s Cost of Living Index from May of this year.
The salaries of assistant professors, once adjusted for cost of living, are below average at eight out of 10 colleges.
The average salary for a faculty member nationwide is $92,823. For assistant professors, the average is $79,792. When accounting for cost of living, though, that number dips to $72,462. Average pay for assistant professors, adjusted for cost of living, was higher than $72,462 at just 486 institutions and lower than that amount at 1,753 of them.
Colleges tend to cluster in areas with the highest cost of living.
Almost a third, or 32.2 percent, of colleges in The Chronicle’s analysis were in counties where cost of living was at least 15 percent higher than the national average. The types of institutions found in these expensive regions tended to vary. About 10 percent of doctoral-granting universities and 23 percent of four-year special-focus institutions (like those specializing in health professions or religious training, for example) are in the priciest 1 percent of the nation’s counties, where the cost of living is more than one-and-a-half times the national average. In contrast, nearly half of associate- and bachelor’s-granting institutions were in counties with below-average costs of living.
“You have a lot of faculty members that face stresses based on the fact that a lot of the job opportunities are in places that are extremely expensive to live in,” says Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.
Making ends meet is toughest in the biggest cities.
It might not come as a surprise that professors’ pay doesn’t get them far in some of the nation’s biggest cities. Of the 25 institutions where adjusted salaries for assistant professors varied most from their actual pay, 17 were located in the country’s three most expensive counties, 15 of which were in New York City. The greatest differential is at Columbia University, where assistant professors make an average of $134,025. But the purchasing power of that salary works out to just $47,342.
The picture for adjunct salaries is similar, with 11 of the institutions where actual and adjusted salaries differed most being found in New York County, and the rest in or near Los Angeles, San Francisco, or San Jose.
Nearly a quarter of institutions are situated in large cities, and 21 percent are in large suburbs. Another 23.9 percent call small or medium cities home. About 29 percent of institutions in large cities are also in counties where the cost of living is at least 150 percent of the national average.
The impact of cost of living can be seen within the same university system.
Let’s look at the California State University system’s 23 campuses. While the state’s generally high cost of living affects all faculty members, adjusted salaries are highest at the Bakersfield campus, where assistant professors draw an adjusted average pay of $72,202. But drive an hour and a half south to the closest campus, Cal State-Northridge, and the adjusted salary drops to $57,896. Cost-of-living-adjusted salaries are lowest at San Francisco State University, where assistant professors’ purchasing power is $24,000 less than their peers at Bakersfield.
Farther east, consider the 10 institutions in Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. Assistant professors’ money goes the farthest at the Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, which has multiple campuses, the largest of which is in Bloomsburg, in Columbia County, where those professors bring in an adjusted average pay of $77,844. Adjusting for cost of living doesn’t make as big a difference in Pennsylvania as it does in California, though; it only boosts the purchasing power of Commonwealth University professors by $311 over their average pay. The adjusted average salary at Cheyney University, in Delaware County, just outside of Philadelphia, is $62,735. About 50 miles west, Lancaster County’s more moderate cost of living means assistant professors at Millersville University earn an adjusted average of $71,819, which translates to a $9,084 difference in adjusted earnings between the campuses.
Writ large, Kezar says, faculty members aren’t pursuing academic careers for a big payout. “Their satisfaction isn’t based on making a lot of money,” she says. Yet, “not having enough money to just live on, to pay for housing and food, becomes such a great stress that we constantly are hearing stories of academics who leave jobs they love because they simply can’t afford to exist.”
So no, Kezar says, the American dream does not still exist for faculty members, especially for adjuncts.
“You might feel middle-class at some institutions, but at a lot of institutions, the pay is barely middle-class,” she says. “There might be 10 to 15 percent of the faculty at Ivy League institutions where it’s still the American dream.”
Jacquelyn Elias contributed data analysis.
