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While the data paint a pessimistic picture for salaries and the attainability of tenure across the board, they do highlight a few fields — including business, health-care, and STEM fields — that have fared relatively well in terms of pay and growth. Education, meanwhile, has struggled: It experienced the highest percentage drop in salaries among The Chronicle‘s subset and was the only field to have fewer faculty members in the 2023-24 academic year than in 2003-04.
No discipline saw salaries keep up with inflation during the period CUPA-HR studied, which included both pandemic-driven cuts to pay and jobs as well as the markedly high levels of inflation that followed. Median pay for just three disciplines — business, health professions, and biological and biomedical sciences — had single-digit percentage drops between 2003 and 2023 when adjusted for inflation, while faculty members in education and computer science endured declines of 13 percent.
With the largest increase in median salary, business remained the gold standard for pay. It’s been among the top four highest-paid disciplines in each of the past 20 years and the single highest-paid discipline for the past nine years, a trend the CUPA-HR researchers attribute in part to stiff competition with the private sector for doctoral-degree holders.
While engineering and computer science were the disciplines closest to keeping pace with business salaries, they were also among the disciplines in which hiring flagged most last year. Only 14 and 17 percent of institutions, respectively, reported having hired an assistant professor in those fields during the 2023-24 academic year, whereas more than a quarter of institutions said they’d added an assistant professor in business. (The CUPA-HR researchers point out that the high demand for business faculty members correlates with the popularity of business as an undergraduate major in recent years.)
The CUPA data also illustrate the shift away from tenure-track staffing in the past decade. In 2013-14, just two of the 10 disciplines whose data The Chronicle analyzed had more than a quarter of faculty members not on the tenure track. But by 2023-24, that trend had reversed: Only two disciplines reported that less than a quarter of faculty members were non-tenure-track. Health professions was an outlier, having started with a much higher proportion of non-tenure-track faculty members than other disciplines. In 2023-24, that proportion ballooned to 61 percent.
Nine of the 10 fields The Chronicle analyzed boasted more faculty members in 2023-24 than in 2003-04, with education being the exception. During a similar period, bachelor’s programs in these disciplines (including education) also grew, according to a Chronicle analysis last year.
Health professions more than doubled its faculty ranks in that 20-year span, which the CUPA-HR researchers note indicates an emphasis on academic programs with clear career paths and high demand in the work force. (Those new jobs are largely off the tenure track.)
