2023–24 AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey Results

The AAUP’s Department of Research has released preliminary findings from the AAUP’s 2023– 24 Faculty Compensation Survey. AAUP chapter leaders, AAUP state conference officers, and AFT local presidents can request access to raw data free of charge for their business purposes, and institutions can purchase such access for a fee. Summary tables are now available at https://www.aaup.org/our-work/research/FCS, along with institution-level appendixes to accompany the forthcoming Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2023–24, which will be published online in June and printed in August in the summer issue of Academe. Final data, including corrected appendixes and data sets, will be released in July.

Data collection for the AAUP’s 2023–24 Faculty Compensa­tion Survey concluded in March, with nearly 870 US colleges and universities providing employment data for approximately 375,000 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 institutional types across the United States, including nearly 250 doctoral universities, 300 regional univer­sities, 200 liberal arts colleges, 100 community colleges, and 180 minority-serving institutions.

The Faculty Compensa­tion Survey includes five components: (1) full-time faculty salaries by rank, gender, and contract length; (2) full-time faculty benefits, including retirement, medical, and dependent tuition benefits; (3) con­tinuing full-time faculty salaries by rank and contract length; (4) salary data for key administrative posi­tions; and (5) salary and benefits data for part-time adjunct faculty members who were paid on a per-course-section basis in the prior academic year. Data on part-time adjunct faculty were collected for the prior academic year, 2022–23, to ensure that institutions could provide complete data for an entire academic year.

Last year, the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2022–23, documented a 2.4 percent decrease in real (inflation-adjusted) average sala­ries for full-time faculty members, the third consecutive year of such declines, with a cumulative decrease of 7.5 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2022 after adjusting for inflation. This year’s annual report will document the eco­nomic status of faculty in a year when the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) rose 3.4 percent from December to December, following a cumula­tive increase of 13.9 percent over the previous two years. The report will document the economic status of both full-time and part-time faculty members, as well as 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. Results may also be explored on the AAUP’s interactive data website, at https://data.aaup.org, which includes institution-level data and tools for summarizing data by region, state, institution size, Carnegie Classification, and other variables.