College faculty salaries: A half century of severe decline

There’s a gathering crisis in the economics of higher education in the USA. The baby bust that started 15 years ago during the Great Recession is about to hit the college admissions pipeline, while decades of profligate spending by wildly overcompensated administrators have left hundreds of colleges and universities with what are essentially unsustainable budget models.

One factor that has not played a role in all this is growth in faculty salaries.

The numbers in this regard are really pretty shocking..

Here’s the growth in average salary for American workers between 1970 and 2021: 39.8%

This of course was not exactly a golden half century for American labor, but in comparison to college faculty, the average American worker did fabulously well.

Growth in average salary of all full time faculty at institutions of higher education in America between 1970 and 2021: 4.1%.

The average worker’s salary went up ten times faster than the average college professor’s did!

On top of this, new data from the AAUP show a 2.4% decline in real wages for full time faculty between 2021 and 2022, so in effect there has been NO salary growth for full time college faculty over the past 52 years.

But even this badly understates the situation, since the percentage of college faculty who are FULL TIME declined from 78% in 1970 to just over 50% in 2021. Since part time faculty make a tiny fraction of what full time faculty are paid, this of course means that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching at America’s colleges and universities are radically lower than they were a half century ago.

American universities are going broke from spending too much money, but that increased spending certainly hasn’t gone to what I suppose in MBA Speak is known as the Content Providers.