A rise in the cost of living chipped away at salary gains by full-time faculty members in the 2017-18 academic year, according to new survey data published on Wednesday by the American Association of University Professors.
Full-time faculty earned an average of 3 percent more than they did in the prior academic year. But that salary increase was cut by nearly two-thirds, to 1.1 percent, after adjusting for inflation.
The average salary ranged widely, depending on rank: Full professors earned $104,820, associate professors made $81,274, and assistant professors took in $70,791. The average pay for lecturers was about $57,000 while, for instructors, it was $59,400.
The AAUP’s analysis also found salary compression at 892 institutions. Almost 100 institutions had associate and assistant professors whose pay was close enough — within $5,000 — to be a sign of salary compression. On average, the pay of both groups is typically separated by $10,600.
The annual report, released a day after Equal Pay Day, shows that 93 percent of all reporting institutions pay men more than women at the same rank — a number that has been consistent for the last few years, according to Joseph Roy, a senior researcher at the AAUP who analyzed the data and prepared the report.
“We can see that on average women made 90 cents on the dollar compared to men at the same rank this year,” Roy wrote in an email, adding that this discrepancy has also held constant for several years. “So, while higher education is closer to parity than other industries, there is still a gap.”
The AAUP’s data also suggest that the retirement landscape looks troubling for faculty members who are just beginning their careers. The likelihood that early career faculty members will be able to save enough for retirement continues to fade, the AAUP said. One of the culprits is the career trajectory of future academics. With the average age of Ph.D. completion at 32, junior faculty enter the work force later than most white-collar workers.
“The age at which faculty members begin saving for retirement can put them at a disadvantage compared with other professionals,” the report said.
And even when Ph.D.s are able to get tenure-track jobs, they often lose employer retirement contributions from prior non-tenure-track and postdoctoral positions — if they were available in the first place, the report says.
The AAUP linked the modest gains in faculty salaries and the gloomy prospects for retirement savings to broader policy decisions made by state governments, like underfunding pension plans and cutting allocations for higher education. The report holds up Illinois and Connecticut — two states whose pension systems are in bad shape — as examples of what went wrong.
“The severe cuts in funding for public colleges and universities in these states seems to be in line with the loss of public confidence in higher education,” the report says. “States, when confronted with financial problems, chose to cut funding to higher education.”
Meanwhile, the economic prospects for the profession look dim, the AAUP said.
“The conditions in higher education that have produced several years of salary changes near or below the rate of inflation seem unlikely to change in the near future,” the report says.
The AAUP collected data from more than 1,000 colleges around the nation for its compensation report.
The Chronicle maintains a separate searchable database on faculty pay at about 4,700 colleges, based on information that is collected by the U.S. Education Department from two years before the data in the AAUP’s report.
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
