2021–22 AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey Data

The AAUP’s Department of Research has released provisional data from its 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey. AAUP chapter and conference leaders may order full data sets and access the research portal free of charge, and institutions may purchase data products for a fee. Summary tables, appendices with detailed institution-level data, and an interactive AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey results tool are now available at https://www.aaup.org/ARES. Complete analyses of this year’s results will be presented in the forthcoming Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2021–22, to be published online in June and printed in August in the summer issue of Academe. Final data, including corrected appendices and data sets, will be released in July.

Data collection for the AAUP’s 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey concluded in March, with more than 900 US colleges and universities providing employment data for more than 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members as well as senior administrators at more than 500 institutions. Participants reflected the wide range of institution types across the United States, including nearly 280 major research universities, 320 regional universities, 160 liberal arts colleges, 100 community colleges, and 170 minority-serving institutions.

The AAUP’s annual Faculty Compensation Survey complements the US Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Human Resources survey component and collects not only full-time faculty salary data by rank, gender, and contract length but also four additional components: full-time faculty benefits, including retirement, medical, and dependent tuition benefits; data on continuing full-time faculty; salary data on key administrative positions; and salary and benefits data for part-time adjunct faculty members who were paid per course section in the prior academic year. The AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey is the largest source of data on part-time adjunct faculty members and draws attention to the appallingly low rates of pay and benefits offered to them at many institutions. Data on part-time adjunct faculty were collected for the prior academic year, 2020–21, to ensure that institutions could provide complete data for an entire academic year.

Last year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession documented the lowest nominal wage growth for full-time faculty members since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. This year’s report will further document the economic impact of the COVID–19 pandemic on faculty in a year when the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) rose 7 percent, the largest December-to-December percentage increase since 1981. The report will document not only changes in the economic status of full-time faculty members but also the status of part-time adjunct faculty members who are paid on a per-course-section basis—and contingent faculty members in general—as well as the continued underrepresentation of women full-time faculty members in higher ranks and gender pay disparities.

For information about data products available from the Department of Research, visit https://research.aaup.org/order.