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This year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession documents the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a year when the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) rose 7.0 percent, the largest December-to-December percentage increase since 1981. The report documents the economic status for not only full-time faculty members but also part-time adjunct faculty members paid on a per-course-section basis—and faculty members on contingent appointments in general. It also includes special sections on the academic labor force and key gender equity indicators, with an eye toward documenting changes that have occurred since the 2019–20 academic year, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The primary data source is the AAUP’s annual Faculty Compensation Survey (FCS), a national survey completed by US college and university administrators. The report also incorporates data from the US Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database and other sources.
Data collection for the AAUP’s 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey concluded in March 2022, with over 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 over 500 institutions. Participants reflected the wide range of institution types across the United States, including nearly 280 major research universities, 320 regional universities, 160 liberal arts colleges, and 100 community colleges. Over 170 minority-serving institutions participated, including 17 historically black colleges and universities.
Provisional results were released in early April 2022, including summary tables and institution-level datasets. Key findings include:
This is the sixty-third Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession since the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey program was established in 1958. The report includes two tables presenting annual full-time faculty salary growth by rank in both nominal and real terms from 1972 to the present, two tables presenting changes in the makeup of the faculty since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten figures representing a wide range of economic indicators, an explanation of statistical data, and eighteen summary tables that allow for comparisons among different categories of colleges and universities, including:
The AAUP’s 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey has given us a first look at how full-time faculty salaries have changed in the second academic year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we will have a better picture next year when the US Department of Education releases IPEDS data. The survey also has provided us a sense of how fringe benefits, administrator pay, gender pay equity, and part-time faculty pay have changed. Collectively, these data sources paint a bleak economic picture of the profession: deteriorating wages of college and university faculty members in relation to the wages of other professions, continued gender pay inequality, appallingly low pay for adjunct faculty members, erosion of the financial structures that support higher education, rising threats to academic freedom and shared governance, and continued uncertainty about the COVID-19 pandemic—all threaten the standards of the profession and the quality of higher education itself.
The report concludes by arguing that in order to meet the AAUP’s goals of achieving equality of opportunities and compensation in the profession, we must develop indicators and procedures, set quantified, verifiable goals, and periodically adjust our policies to help fight gendered, ethnoracial, and other social discrimination in the profession. Furthermore, achieving those goals will require the participation of faculty members, administrators, associations, labor unions, elected officials, and citizens, who must all demand access to relevant data to inform policy decisions. We can break the cycle only through up-to-date, objective, reliable demographic data and complete transparency regarding faculty compensation and working conditions, combined with collective action focused on social justice.
The AAUP Research Department released provisional data from the 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey in April 2022. Final datasets, including corrected appendices, will be released in July 2022. The following components are now available.
Important: The appendices are designed to be viewed as two-page spreads. To view the appendices as a spread, please download the PDF and reopen it after saving.