College professors are paid less now than they were in 1970, while upper administrator salaries have increased many times over

Let’s take a look at the latest numbers on these trends, courtesy of the Digest of Education Statistics.

First, I want to frame all this with a big caveat: The initial numbers I’m reporting here are for by far the most privileged faculty at American colleges and universities, which is to say tenured and tenure-track professors. The full picture, which we’ll get to eventually, is much bleaker for the people who do the actual teaching at these institutions, since the large majority of classes in American academia are taught by people who aren’t tenured or on the tenure track.

The numbers below are adjusted for inflation, specifically the government’s consumer price index.

Full Professors

Average salary in 1970-71: $135,472

Average salary in 2022-23: $135,344

Associate Professors

1970-71: $102,322

2022-23: $95, 934

Assistant Professors:

1970-71: $84,312

2022-23: $82,520

How does this compare to the wages of the average American worker over this same time frame? Even though the last half century has been a pretty bad one for the average American worker, relative to the growth of capital and the associated wealth of its owners, said worker has done much, much better than college professors, as per the National Average Wage Index, the average worker’s wages increased by 40.4% between 1970 and 2023. Meanwhile, real salaries for tenured and tenure track professors actually declined.

But of course TTT professors are, comparatively speaking, the cosseted and pampered darlings at the very top of the faculty hierarchy, While nearly four out of every five professors were full-time faculty in 1970, barely half are in 2025. And because of the massive teaching loads carried by contingent faculty, probably less than a third of classes at American universities are taught by TTT faculty, whose salaries, although they’ve declined by about 45% compared to the wages of the average American worker over the past 55 years, might as well be plutocratic emoluments compared to what contingent faculty are paid.

Speaking of plutocracy, what’s happened to the salaries of upper administrators during this time, i.e., the people who run these institutions, and to a significant extent decide what they themselves are going to be paid?

The mean salary of university presidents in 1983 was approximately $190,000, in 2023 dollars, while the very highest paid president was making around $370,000, again in 2023 dollars. Today, dozens if not hundreds of university presidents are making many multiples of those figures.

The situation at the University of Michigan, which I’m very familiar with for autobiographical reasons, is fairly typical. When I was an undergraduate in 1980, the new president was making about $288,000 in salary, in 2025 dollars. The current president just got a nice raise in base salary, to $1.3 million (this is 33% more than he was making two years ago). 45 years ago, Michigan’s president was making about double the salary of the average tenured professor at the institution. That figure has now grown to approximately a seven-fold difference — and needless to say, the University of Michigan’s tenured professors are the very tippy top of the already privileged caste of tenured university faculty.

This, however, is not nearly as extreme as the growth in the salary of the athletic director, which has gone from $222,000 in 1975 (2025 dollars), to $2.4 million. Michigan had the largest and most profitable athletic department in the country 50 years ago, with an operating budget of $26 million (2025 dollars). That figure is now almost exactly ten times higher in real inflation-adjusted dollars.

Etcetera.