Faculty pay increase is lowest in decades

With the minimal increase, the University’s overall national rank in full professors’ salaries fell from third to fifth this year. Full professors at Harvard are the nation’s highest paid, earning an average of $191,200 annually, followed by Columbia, the University of Chicago and Stanford, where full professors take home an average of $188,600, $184,100 and $181,400 per year, respectively.

On a national scale, full-time faculty members at universities received average salary increases of just 1.2 percent, the lowest increase in the 50 years that the AAUP has been conducting its survey. The AAUP also reported an average 2.7 percent increase in the cost of living, indicating that faculty members had less purchasing power this year than they did in the 2008-09 academic year. The average full-time faculty salary at Princeton increased 2 percent, slightly more than the national average for the 1,141 institutions surveyed in the report, John Curtis, AAUP research and public policy director, said in an e-mail.

On average, associate professors at the University earned $116,900 annually, assistant professors earned $87,700 and instructors earned $69,000, according to the report. These represent salary increases of 2.3 percent, 2.2 percent and 5.7 percent, respectively.

Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin cautioned against relying too heavily on data in the AAUP report.

“There are other sources that we use to give a fairer compensation and a better sense of how our compensation policies compare with those of our peers,” he said in an e-mail. “Based on all the data we use, we then prepare an annual request to the Priorities Committee to propose the part of the annual budget that should be devoted to salary increases.”

In February 2009, the Board of Trustees approved a recommendation by the Priorities Committee to weight salary increases so that raises for assistant professors and employees in the lowest salary bracket would receive the bulk of raises. A ceiling of $2,000 was placed on raises for tenured professors and the highest-paid University employees.

Male full professors at the University earn an average salary of $183,600, while female full professors earn $170,700. The gender disparity is negligible at the associate professor level, where women earned an average of $117,000, $200 more than men did. Male assistant professors earned an average annual salary of $90,100, while female assistant professors earned $83,700.

Dobkin said that the University conducts “an annual evaluation of salaries by gender corrected for factors such as field, years since highest degree [and] rank ... in order to determine if there are places where we are slipping.”

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Curtis said that the nationwide trend of low salary increases was not surprising. “We were certainly anticipating that this would be a difficult year for faculty salaries,” he said.

But the figures have significant implications for the nation’s higher education institutions, Curtis said. “The broader question, at the level of the academic profession, is whether we can continue to attract the most talented individuals to careers in academia,” he explained.

“Although almost no one chooses a teaching career as a means to earn a high salary ... most faculty members do have options,” he said, adding that he was concerned that professors might choose to leave academia if financial conditions in the field continued to decline.

The average annual salary for full-time faculty at Princeton was $140,277 this year, around $60,000 more than the national average of $80,368, Curtis said.

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Curtis stressed the role of faculty members in fulfilling universities’ fundamental missions. “Faculty members must have a meaningful role in charting the institution’s course when tough choices that affect the entire institution are being made,” Curtis said.

Dobkin noted that the University has not had to consider unpaid furloughs, which have been instituted elsewhere.

But Curtis predicted that the current financial conditions in academia were not quite over. “We anticipate that next year will be challenging as well ... since the higher education sector tends to lag the rest of the economy by a year or two,” he said.