Faculty salaries rose faster than inflation last year but failed to regain all of the ground lost after the most recent recession, according to an annual report on faculty pay released this week by the American Association of University Professors.
Controlling for inflation, salaries for full-time faculty members in the 2014-15 academic year were up 1.4 percent over the year before, marking the second year in a row in which they rose faster than the rate of inflation, the AAUP’s report says.
“We are not losing ground as we were in previous years immediately following the recession. That is the silver lining there,” says John Barnshaw, a co-author of the report and senior higher-education-research officer at the AAUP.
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But faculty members continue to earn slightly less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did before the economic downturn six years ago, the report concludes. The recent trend, it says, represents the continuation of a long period of stagnation in pay for full-time faculty members.
The AAUP’s report, titled “Busting the Myths,” seeks to refute arguments the group says it hears routinely, such as that professors are overpaid and that their salaries are to blame for tuition increases.
The report also takes issue with those who argue that spending on faculty benefits is a primary driver of rising costs in higher education. Spending on those benefits, the report says, rose by roughly 6 percent over the five-year period from 2009-10 to 2013-14. Benefit packages — which represent about 30 percent of the compensation for full-time instructional faculty — remained fairly intact despite the nation’s economic troubles. But, the report adds, faculty benefits account for much too small a share of colleges’ total spending to explain their rising costs.
Medical and dental benefits accounted for about 11 percent, and retirement benefits just over 10 percent, of what colleges spent per faculty member in 2014-15, according to the AAUP report. The most-generous benefit packages, of just over $30,000 per faculty member, went to those at private, independent colleges. Religiously affiliated colleges offered the least generous packages, at just under $23,000 per faculty member.
Big Disparities
As in past years, faculty earnings continued to vary widely by rank and by type of institution.
Full professors at private independent doctoral institutions remained at the top of the pile, earning average salaries of nearly $178,000 and average total compensation packages of nearly $224,000 in the 2014-15 academic year.
At the bottom were full-time lecturers and instructors at community colleges, who earned average salaries of about $48,000 and total compensation packages of just under $67,000. The AAUP’s annual survey does not chart the earnings of instructors who work part time; they generally earn significantly less — even per hour worked — than do their full-time colleagues.
As had been the case in other recent years, faculty members with the title of associate professor experienced slower growth in their salaries in 2014-15 than others who were tenured or on the tenure track.
Disparities in pay also remain between men and women at nearly every rank and every type of institution. Over all, full-time professors who are men earned an average of nearly $96,000, while those who are women earned an average of just over $77,000.
The AAUP annually surveys more than 1,100 institutions in developing its report.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
