Full-time Faculty Salaries Sink in Academic Year 2004-2005

by Roberta Spalter-Roth and William Erskine, Research and Development Department

Academic salaries increased by 2.8 percent, on average, in Academic Year 2004/2005. This increase was outpaced by the inflation rate of 3.3 percent, for a decrease of 0.5 percent in constant dollars, the first real wage loss in the last eight years. These findings are based on data from a survey of 1,416 institutions of higher education conducted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Additional survey results show differences between public and private schools (salary increases at the latter were higher than the rate of inflation) and among faculty ranks (with the highest percentage increase going to full professors). How did full-time faculty salaries in sociology compare to these cross-disciplinary faculty trends? Unfortunately, AAUP does not collect data by discipline and we need to turn to another survey to find the answer to this question. The National Faculty Salary Survey, conducted by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR), is based on a survey of 819 institutions of higher education, 581 of which reported the salaries of 3,449 sociology faculty.

Sociology versus Other Disciplines

Unlike the AAUP findings, the CUPA data show a slight 0.7 percent overall increase in salaries above the rate of inflation (see columns 1 and 2 in Table 1). For all disciplines, the only decrease in real dollars is found among new assistant professors—a group that has seen above-average increases in prior years. Sociology appears to have taken salary hits when compared to all disciplines, with the average sociology salary (including both public and private institutions and all ranks) decreasing by 1.1 percent in real dollars compared to the slight increases for all disciplines. Findings from the CUPA-HR data show that sociologists experience slightly greater losses in private universities compared to public institutions, an unexpected finding given the comparatively higher growth rate in faculty salaries at private institutions over the decade. As with sociology, the category of “other” social science disciplines (including anthropology, economics, geography, and political science) also experienced salary decreases in real dollars although they were slight (see Figure 1). Figure 1 also shows that sociology salaries are an average of $8,000 less per year than the “other” social science disciplines. Economics is the highest paid of these social science disciplines (at $78,383) and its higher salaries pulls up the average. Still, with the exception of geography, sociology has the lowest average salary among all these social science disciplines.

Rank

For the first time in the more than two decades, full professors in sociology at both public and private institutions experienced salary losses in real dollars (see last year’s salary brief Have Faculty Salaries Peaked?: Sociology Wage Growth Flat in Constant Dollars at www2.asanet .org/research/Salary
Brief2004.pdf and Figure 2). The reason for this decline may be high retirement rates for the large 1960s cohort of sociologists, who were likely the highest earning sociology faculty, on average. Associate professors’ salaries remained flat, as they have for many years. The flatness of these salaries may be the result of the shifts in the demographics of faculty, the size and composition of departments, the distribution of departments across institutions of higher education, and the decline in bargaining power. More research is needed to answer the question of why sociology faculty salaries are low compared to other social science disciplines. The good news for the future of sociology is that the salaries of assistant professors at both public and private institutions and the salaries of new assistant professors at public universities are still growing in real dollars, as institutions still apparently need to compete for this new faculty.