AAUP Reports Third Consecutive Year of Faculty Wages Falling Short of Inflation

Today, the AAUP released the 2022–23 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which presents key findings from the AAUP’s annual Faculty Compensation Survey. Data collection for the survey concluded in March 2023, with nearly 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.

Key Findings

• Despite increases in average salaries of 4.1 percent for full-time faculty members from fall 2021 to fall 2022—the greatest one-year increase since 1990–91—real average salaries decreased 2.4 percent after adjusting for inflation.
• Real average salaries have declined sharply for three consecutive years, with a cumulative decrease of 7.5 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2022.
• Average full-time faculty salaries for women were 82.3 percent of those for men in 2022–23, and the gender salary-equity ratio—the ratio of women’s salaries to men’s—is 87.0 for full professors. Women make up an average of 48.2 percent of all full-time faculty as of fall 2021, and only 35.7 percent of full professors.
• Part-time faculty members who were paid on a per-course-section basis in 2021–22 received an average of $3,874 per course section, a 0.8 percent increase from 2020–21, when the average pay was $3,843, but an 8.9 percent increase from 2019–20, when the average pay was $3,556.
• From fall 2019 through fall 2022, median presidential salaries increased 9.6 percent in nominal terms, compared with a 7.1 percent increase in average salaries for full-time faculty members during the same period.
• The number of faculty members employed on contingent appointments decreased by over 57,000 (6.9 percent) from fall 2019 to fall 2020, and contingent faculty employment had recovered by only about 25 percent in fall 2021.
• The number of graduate student employees plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing by 13,551 (3.7 percent) from fall 2019 to fall 2020, but recovered by 90 percent in fall 2021.

This is the sixty-fourth Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession published since the AAUP established the Faculty Compensation Survey program in 1958. Results of the survey are published in April for the current academic year, with a full Annual Report published online in June and printed in August in the AAUP's annual Bulletin. Final datasets, including corrected appendices and datasets, will be released in July. The report and associated data can be found here.