An article from Faculty salaries grow but still lag pre-pandemic era

Amid constrained budgets, real compensation for full-time faculty rose for the second year in a row, per the American Association of University Professors.

Published April 11, 2025 Ben Unglesbee Senior Reporter

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Full-time faculty salaries rose for the second year in a row, even after adjusting for inflation, according to preliminary compensation data from the American Association of University Professors. 

Fall 2024 salaries rose an average of 3.8% year over year, though inflation brought that growth down to an increase of 0.9%, according to the study.

Even with two years of gains, faculty compensation has not fully recovered from the pandemic period, which brought a 7.5% effective drop in salaries from 2019 to 2022, AAUP said.

Faculty’s inflation-adjusted salaries are still climbing out of their pandemic dip Year over year growth in nominal and real salaries from academic years 2017-18 to 2024-25. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}();

During an era of constrained budgets for many institutions — with job and program cuts making headlines — institutions are under a countervailing pressure to invest in their people and infrastructure after years of belt-tightening. Some colleges have given employees raises even as they make budget cuts in other areas.

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Preliminary data from AAUP’s latest faculty study shows salaries making some headway even in an era of slashed budgets. Fall’s salary increases for full-time faculty followed an inflation-adjusted 0.4% increase in 2023. 

Those of course are averages, and figures varied across rank and job types. Associate professors’ salaries, for example, typically grew at a faster clip in the 2024-25 academic year than professors or assistant professors — while lecturers’ salaries rose faster than all of those positions, with growth over 6% at the doctoral and master’s level institutions, according to AAUP’s study. 

The survey also found continued gender disparities for professor compensation, with men earning nearly $26,000 more than women at doctoral institutions and about $8,000 more at master’s institutions. 

College and university presidents typically made around four times or more than the average faculty member across most institution types, according to the study. 

Part-time faculty made an average of $4,093 per class section in the 2023-24 academic year. But their compensation “varied widely” depending on where they worked, AAUP said.

At private nonprofits, a part-time faculty member could make an average of $1,950 per section teaching at associate-granting institutions compared to $6,481 at bachelor’s-degree colleges. 

Maximum payments could run into the tens of thousands of dollars across institution types. Meanwhile, some part-time faculty could earn as little as $700 per section teaching at a public university. 

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Just over one-third of colleges, 34.4%, made retirement plan contributions for at least some part-time faculty, and fewer than one-third, 32.5%, contributed to insurance premiums for at least some part-timers.

The AAUP analysis is based on surveys of more than 800 U.S. institutions, with data on roughly 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members. 

CUPA-HR also found annual salary growth across much of the sector in the 2024-25 academic year. 

After factoring in inflation of 2.7%, salaries went up 1.2% for administrators, 1% for professional staff, 1.1% for general staff and 0.5% for nontenure-track faculty, according to CUPA-HR. Real salaries for tenure-track faculty fell 0.1%.

As with AAUP, CUPA-HR noted that higher education salaries still fell short of pre-pandemic levels despite growth. The largest gaps are in salaries for tenure-track faculty — paid 10.2% less than in the pre-pandemic era after adjusting for inflation — and non-tenure-track teaching faculty, who are paid 7.6% less.

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