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Average full-time faculty pay rose again, per an AAUP report, but not to pre-pandemic levels.
Colleges and universities participating in the American Association of University Professors’ annual faculty pay survey have reported a promising trend: For two years in a row now, the inflation-adjusted average salary for continuing, full-time faculty has increased.
Continuing faculty are those who have been employed at the same institution for two consecutive years. From fall 2022 to fall 2023, their average salary in real dollars increased 1.5 percent, and it rose another 1.8 percent from fall 2023 to last fall, according to the report, which the AAUP released today.
But looking at fall 2024’s real average salary among both continuing and new full-time faculty, the last two years of progress weren’t enough to fully recover from three consecutive years of decline, the report shows. Faculty pay hasn’t yet returned to the high mark of the last quarter century, which was set in fall 2019. Historic inflation took its toll.
“Real average salaries have still not fully recovered from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and remain about 6.2 percent lower than they were in fall 2019,” the report says. It further notes the significant financial headwinds institutions now face, leading to budget issues that might leave less room to increase faculty pay.
“We are observing an uptick in college closings,” the report says. “The college-age population is expected to shrink considerably in some states over the next several years; dwindling enrollment and volatility in government funding for higher education will place many more institutions at risk.”
“Now, given recent actions taken by the Trump administration, both public and private institutions are facing funding cuts writ large, such as freezes to NIH grants and reduced funding for indirect costs,” the report says. “Institutions that have come to rely on large numbers of international students for tuition revenue could see that revenue greatly diminished as well. In these uncertain times, increased economic security for faculty members may remain elusive.”
Of the institutions participating in the survey, the average salary for a full-time faculty member ranged from about $62,000 for instructors at primarily associate degree–granting institutions that have standard faculty ranking systems, all the way up to $181,000 for full professors at doctoral universities.
Gender pay disparities persist in academe, with female full-time faculty averaging $106,000, 83 percent of men’s average of $127,000. But the report notes that this 83 percent salary-equity ratio is the same for the U.S. economy as a whole, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The AAUP report doesn’t break down pay by race or ethnicity.
Glenn Colby, AAUP’s senior researcher, said the 2024–25 academic year survey data is preliminary, and the final data set will be released next month.
More than 800 institutions provided data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty, the AAUP said. Over 500 colleges and universities also reported on their senior administrators’ pay. The institutions that participated included roughly 225 doctoral universities, 320 regional ones, 180 liberal arts colleges, 175 minority-serving institutions and 80 community colleges.
“Especially among doctoral institutions, research institutions, we have very high participation rates,” Colby said. By contrast, “participation among community colleges is very low,” he said.
The report allows readers to see salary data at individual institutions, but if they’re looking for a nationally representative picture of community college pay, Colby said the survey results should be viewed “with some skepticism.”
Community colleges struggle to complete the survey because they might have only one institutional researcher on staff, he said, compared to a dozen at a large research university.
“They just do not have the resources to complete it,” Colby said. “And we try to work with community college systems or at the state level sometimes, and it’s the same story there.”
Only 336 institutions reported part-time faculty pay data on a per-course basis, and the data is for the 2023–24 academic year, not the year that just concluded. They received an average of $4,000 per three-credit course section.
“Part-time faculty pay remains appallingly low,” the report says.
