Despite an increase in faculty salary, the higher ed pay gap between what faculty and administrators earn is widening as inflation saps paychecks, a new report reveals.
The findings on faculty pay are “sobering” during a turbulent period shaped by “inflation, political interference, volatile research funding, uneven enrollment recovery, persistent reliance on contingent labor, and widening financial disparities across colleges and universities,” say the authors of American Association of University Professors’s “Annual Report On The Economic Status of The Profession.”
Average full-time faculty salaries rose 2.3% from fall 2024 to fall 2025. But inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, rose 2.7%, meaning faculty spending power dropped, AAUP concluded.
Meanwhile, real average full-time faculty salaries remain about 9.5% below their fall 2019 level and about 5.8% below their fall 2008 level, the report added.
“Salary patterns reveal whether institutions are protecting the people and practices that sustain teaching, research, and shared governance, or whether they are increasingly being driven by crisis management and external pressure,” the authors contend.
Presidential compensation ranged from three to more than five times a full professor’s average salary, depending on sector and institutional type. “That ratio remains one of the clearest illustrations of the widening gap between executive compensation and faculty pay,” the authors noted.
Here are more numbers from the report:
- Median presidential salaries ranged from about $275,000 at public associate’s institutions without ranking systems to $850,000 at private-independent doctoral universities.
- Full-time female faculty earned an average of $108,678, compared with $130,064 for men.
‘Continuing shift away from tenure’
Beyond compensation, the report tracked “the continuing shift away from tenure.” About 31% of faculty members held full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments in fall 2023, compared with 53.1% in fall 1987.
Some 768 colleges and universities provided data on 359,234 full-time faculty members while 484 institutions reporting data on senior administrators, the AAUP said.
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