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Illustration showing two professors outside a university building sunk down in a large canyon, looking up at an unreachable outside world above them.
Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle

The Faculty Salary Squeeze

Professors brace for another year of losing ground.
Stagnant pay
By Adrienne Lu May 14, 2025

Living expenses have ballooned in the 14 years since Robert Gallagher, a professor of sociology, psychology, and human services, started working at Broward College. His monthly car insurance bill has doubled from about $125 to $250. His annual homeowners insurance has grown from about $2,500 to $4,500.

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Living expenses have ballooned in the 14 years since Robert Gallagher, a professor of sociology, psychology, and human services, started working at Broward College. His monthly car insurance bill has doubled from about $125 to $250. His annual homeowners insurance has grown from about $2,500 to $4,500.

His salary hasn’t come close to keeping up. Since 2012, Broward’s faculty members have received annual raises averaging just over 1 percent, according to the faculty union. For at least six of those years, they received no raises to base pay.

For Gallagher, that means his primary paycheck has only grown from $56,000 to $67,000. When adjusted for inflation, it has effectively declined by 15 percent. “Homeowners insurance, car insurance, cost of living — everything goes up and up and up and up,” said Gallagher, 51. “The only thing that doesn’t go up is our pay.”

His experience is not unique.

From 2013 to 2023, the latest year for which data are available, the average pay for faculty members nationwide when adjusted for inflation has decreased by 1.5 percent, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). For full professors, the average pay has decreased by 3.2 percent over that same period, while for full-time staff, it grew by 4 percent. Meanwhile, national salary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that average salaries across all industries increased by 7.7 percent over the same period, after adjusting for inflation.

Why the difference? Experts attribute the faculty wage stagnation to growth in institutional debt and noninstructional expenses, declines in state funding, and some unusual attributes of the profession. With President Trump’s draconian cuts to higher education, many faculty members are bracing for yet another year with a minute pay raise or none at all — assuming they are even able to hold on to their jobs. Emory University, for example, announced a freeze on compensation adjustments as part of a series of budget measures in response to funding uncertainties, and Princeton University has announced it would decrease the amount of money available for merit increases.

Increasing faculty salaries is easier said than done. For one thing, it costs less to give a few top administrators a raise than to increase the salaries of every professor on campus. Spending has grown over time because colleges have been asked to do more, including supporting student success, mental health, and online education, for example, all of which required new investments. And during tough financial periods, it’s easier to freeze salaries — or lay off employees — than to reduce spending on, say, utility bills.

The rise in adjunctification means colleges have been paying faculty members lower wages for decades. But faculty wage stagnation has serious implications for colleges: high turnover, low morale, quiet quitting, increased unionization, and more strikes. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some job openings now receive far fewer applicants than they have in the past.

The recent growth in unionization, including among contingent faculty, who now make up about 68 percent of American faculty, according to the American Association of University Professors, could be a sign that colleges will need to start taking the issue of wage stagnation more seriously.

Broward administrators and the faculty union have been negotiating a contract since November 2024 and some of the numbers regarding pay increases are in dispute. According to a spokesperson for the university, since 2015, faculty members have also received four one-time payments, which don’t increase base pay, ranging from $1,200 to $3,250. In response to a request for comment about faculty salaries, Broward College’s president and chief executive, Torey Alston, who took office in February, wrote in an email that commenting publicly and providing details “would not be appropriate” with contract negotiations underway. “Working with our board, I am committed to working to provide increased compensation to all employees based on our budget,” he wrote.

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Meanwhile, Gallagher has taken on more and more work over the years to bridge the gap between his salary and his living expenses. Each semester, he must ask his associate dean for classes beyond the five required by his contract, which feels to him like “groveling.”

He now teaches as many as 10 classes a semester — seven at Broward and three online at Nova Southeastern University — and serves as a manager for Broward’s human-services program. “I’m overwhelmed, but I have to do it,” he said.

Gallagher estimates he works at least 80 hours a week, which leaves little time for anything else. He “speed grades” his students’ papers. He’s put research on topics such as family violence, aging care, and substance abuse on the back burner. He stopped volunteering as an adviser for the Gay-Straight Alliance student group because he didn’t have the time — but returned this semester because he missed working with the students. He could only spend an hour a week with them, he told them. He would like to expand the human-services program at Broward, which he founded, from a two-year program to a bachelor’s degree program — but there are only so many hours in a day.

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“You really have to learn to go, go, go, go, go,” said Gallagher, who even talks fast. “You don’t have time to look back. You don’t have time to think, OK, from an academic standpoint, I’m going to try a new pedagogy, I’m going to try a new way of learning something, I’m going to read a lot of research. You just don’t have time.”

A recent analysis by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, underscored that despite recent pay raises, after adjusting for inflation, many academic employees are still being paid less now than they were in 2019-2020 — before the pandemic. Faculty members have taken the biggest hit: Median salaries for staff are now 2.8 percent less; non-tenure-track faculty, 7.6 percent less; and tenure-track faculty, 10.2 percent less, after adjusting for inflation, according to the analysis. Over the nine years of data analyzed, from 2016-17 to 2024-25, the median raises of tenure-track faculty have never surpassed inflation.

Faculty members’ salaries have also effectively declined when taking a much longer view. An AAUP interactive data tool using information from IPEDS shows that after adjusting for inflation, average salaries for full-time faculty members have declined since 2002. That holds true across almost every rank, from instructors to full professors. (Lecturers, the second-lowest paid group after instructors, were the only group to earn slightly more after adjusting for inflation.)

The salaries of the highest-paid administrators have drawn particular scrutiny and hurt morale among the rank-and-file. The median base salaries for presidents of doctoral institutions increased 27 percent, from 2019 to 2023, compared to 10 percent for full professors at doctoral institutions, over the same period, according to the AAUP.

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Saranna R. Thornton, a professor of economics and business at Hampden-Sydney College, said one culprit in wage stagnation is the race for students. Thornton, who has been studying faculty salaries for about 20 years on the AAUP committee that produces an annual faculty-compensation survey, said many colleges today sell themselves with great gyms, dorms, lazy rivers, and sports programs that “everybody can get excited about and celebrate.” As a result, she said, the “teaching side and the scholarship side is de-emphasized, and therefore the labor that produces it is de-emphasized.”

Thornton observed that colleges are also different from other types of businesses because it’s difficult for their customers — students — to discern changes in quality over time. For example, Thornton said that she loves Breyers ice cream and has been eating it for 50 years. If the quality of Breyers ice cream were to suddenly decline, she would notice and switch to another brand. But college students, who are typically on campus for only a handful of years, may not notice a significant change in the quality of the education they’re receiving over the course of their time in college. Even if they could discern a change, transferring is difficult and costly.

It’s even harder for faculty members to move. Depending on their field, they may find it tough to move to another institution or another line of work. Contingent faculty members, in particular, are unlikely to earn much higher wages by moving to another college.

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“Institutions can kind of bank on that and may not have to be as diligent about salary increases,” said Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

McClure pointed out that professors typically receive only two significant promotions over their entire careers. The accompanying raises are often modest. McClure, for example, will be promoted from associate to full professor in July. The promotion took six years and a 1,000-page dossier documenting his accomplishments and will result in a raise of $6,000, he said. Meanwhile, his wife, who works in the private sector in the affordable housing industry, recently received a $10,000 raise along with her six-month review.

Among the institutions fighting against the narrative of declining faculty salaries is St. Mary’s College, in Notre Dame, Ind., a Catholic women’s college. For many years, the college’s faculty-compensation committee would set benchmarks with peer institutions and then miss them, said Megan Zwart, a professor of philosophy who became interim provost and vice president last July.

When Katie Conboy started as president in 2020, her first strategic plan included tackling that issue. The college worked with a consultant to gather information and then create a three-phase plan to move faculty and staff to their benchmark salaries. In the first phase, which was implemented last December, about half of the employees who were below their benchmarks reached them; in January, all employees received cost-of-living adjustments.

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St. Mary’s benefits from being in a relatively strong financial position. Changes to the curriculum aimed at helping to translate the skills students learn in the liberal arts to be attractive to employers, substantial gifts that the college is using to build a center for career and advising, and a marketing campaign have all helped to increase student enrollment three consecutive years, Zwart said.

“There’s so much in our strategy for the future,” Conboy said. “It all relies on morale and people feeling good about working at St Mary’s.”

The administration hopes that the investment in faculty and staff salaries will pay dividends down the road. Because of St. Mary’s location in the Midwest, the college needs to offer good salaries to attract good candidates, Zwart said. “If we want to keep having happy, high-quality faculty,” improving compensation, she said, “can’t always be the last thing you do.”

Some professors are so tired of living paycheck to paycheck they’re figuring out an exit strategy. Sheila Liming, an associate professor at Champlain College, in Burlington, Vt., said she has received only four raises in the 11 years she’s worked in higher education. She left the University of North Dakota in 2020 after the state went through four straight years of budget cuts. A spokesperson for the North Dakota University system confirmed that the legislature enacted budget cuts for the four fiscal years ending in June 2019. And while Liming got a bump in pay when she moved to Champlain, she said the only raises she has received since have been paltry. A spokesperson for Champlain said faculty members have received three raises in the past five years of 1, 3, and 5 percent.

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“What I have learned is that if you want to increase your pay and if you want to progress in your own financial situation, it’s hard to do so from within the institution and the job that you currently have,” Liming said. “So it ends up feeling like a system that increasingly pushes you to look elsewhere if you want those opportunities, which in other industries are more built in.”

Liming loves working with students and interacting with her colleagues. Still, her stagnant paychecks have her wondering how long she can afford to stay. “It has forced me to think pretty hard about backup plans and to imagine what I would do outside of academia,” she said.

When Jeffrey Stuart accepted a job as an associate professor at Pacific Lutheran University in 2001 for less pay than he made as a tenured professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, he was assured that the university had a five-year plan to bring its pay up to match those of their peer institutions. That plan never materialized, Stuart said.

“That was the first of many five-year plans we had, probably as many five-year plans as the Soviet Union had, and they were roughly as effective,” said Stuart, a professor of math. In the 24 years he’s been at Pacific Lutheran, Stuart’s annual salary has increased from $45,000 to $96,200. The university has also cut contributions to employee retirement plans over the past several years, Stuart said.

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At 67 years old, Stuart said he is the highest paid member of his department but that his salary is comparable to what the University of Washington pays “newly hired, fresh out of graduate school mathematicians.” He looks at the salary distributions published by the American Mathematical Society. Over time, he said, his salary has slid into the bottom 25 percent. “I’m embittered because I feel very devalued by my university,” Stuart said.

A spokesperson for the university pointed out that average salary increases since 2020-21 have exceeded the average inflation rate in Washington State. He said the university decreased retirement contributions a number of years ago but has increased them again recently.

Low pay and the precarity of their jobs has a direct impact on faculty members’ ability to do good work, said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center of Higher Education and a professor of leadership and higher education at the University of Southern California, whose research focuses on contingent faculty members. “They are feeling unable to focus on their teaching,” Kezar said. “They talk about this psychic stress of constantly trying to pick up classes,” just to earn less than many fast-food workers. That makes it harder for them to be attentive, give helpful feedback, or update their syllabi.

Kezar said she had hoped that college leaders would start to improve salaries realizing it was in their institutions’ best interest. Instead, she said, “it seems like it’s probably going to just be faculty unionizing and forcing the hand of institutions into better pay.” Higher-education unions — particularly among undergraduate and graduate students and contingent faculty — have exploded in recent years, and with them, the number of strikes, oftentimes leading to pay raises for faculty.

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While McClure doesn’t see unions as the answer to every problem in higher education, he said, “there is little doubt, based on the evidence, that if we are attempting to improve working conditions [and] increase salary, unions are a very effective strategy for doing so.”

McClure advises college leaders to implement a consistent program for pay increases that employees can count on. For many years, he said, “institutions could rely on posting a faculty job and expecting a mountain of applicants, kind of irrespective of the salary or the job or the workload, because there was just incredible demand for these jobs.”

But that is now changing, and institutions may find it getting harder and harder to fill roles. “There’s the potential for kind of a reckoning in higher education at some point,” McClure said.

Brian O’Leary, senior interactive news producer, contributed to this report.

A version of this article appeared in the May 23, 2025, issue.
Read other items in Strained Budgets. Stagnant Wages. Serious Uncertainty..
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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About the Author
Adrienne Lu
Adrienne Lu writes about staff and living and working in higher education. She can be reached at adrienne.lu@chronicle.com or on Twitter @adriennelu.
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