What Professors Off the Tenure Track at 4-Year Colleges Made in 2015-16

Professors off the tenure track in science technologies make less than 60 percent of what their tenure-track colleagues in the discipline earn, according to the results of an annual survey released on Monday by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.

While that’s the greatest such gap within a discipline, untenured faculty members make substantially less than tenured or tenure-track faculty members across all fields. The next-greatest disparities come in the fields of law, business, and ethnic, cultural, and gender studies.

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The discipline in which pay most closely approaches equality is theology and religious studies. Professors off the tenure track earn 97.5 percent as much as tenure-track faculty members do. But even that information comes with a caveat: Whether tenured or not, religious-studies professors are among the lowest-paid faculty members over all.

The figures below are based on the salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors at 743 public and private colleges nationwide.

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Note: The survey classifies teaching professors by their years of experience. Teaching professors have 15 or more years in the classroom; teaching associate professors have seven to 14 years; teaching assistant professors have four to six years; and teaching instructors or lecturers have zero to three years.