Faculty Real Wages Decrease Again

Key Preliminary Findings:

• Average salaries for full-time faculty members (all ranks combined) increased 4.1 percent, the greatest one-year increase since 1990–91.
• Average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 4.5 percent among public institutions, 3.8 percent among private-independent institutions, and 2.7 percent among religiously affiliated institutions.
• Real average salaries for full-time faculty members decreased 2.4 percent, the third consecutive year that wage growth has fallen short of inflation.
• Average salaries for continuing full-time faculty members—those employed in fall 2021 and remaining employed in 2022—increased 4.8 percent in nominal terms, but decreased 1.7 percent in real terms, after adjusting for inflation.
• In the prior academic year (2021–22), average pay for adjunct faculty members to teach a standard three-credit-hour course section ranged from $2,839 in associate’s institutions without ranks to $4,969 in doctoral institutions.

Nearly 900 US colleges and universities provided data on over 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 300 doctoral universities, 250 regional universities, 200 liberal arts colleges, 100 community colleges, and 180 minority-serving institutions.

You can explore the results on the AAUP’s interactive data website, which includes institution-level data and tools for summarizing data by region, state, institution size, Carnegie Basic Classification, and other variables. Read more and access summary tables and appendices with listings for individual institutions here.

Complete analyses of this year’s results will be presented in the forthcoming Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession 2022–23, to be published this summer. Final datasets, including corrected appendices and datasets, will be released in July.