It depends on where you are, of course, and varies by your field, the size and type of institution, the rank of the professor, and some other factors.

I was challenged recently in response to a comment on another question to defend my assertion that college professors in the U.S. are actually paid a lot less now than they were even thirty years ago, and less than public school teachers, so I did some digging.

It is “well known” that 75% of tertiary teachers are adjunct or contingent, and that the median pay is $2700 per class, which would be $21,600 for a full-time teaching load.

But this is well known because those numbers have been floating around a few years. Since a 2012 report from the American Association of University Professors and the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, as it turns out. So I took the opportunity to check for updated information.

A more recent study of the American Federation of Teachers indicates it is a little closer to $3500 per class (which would be $28,000 full time), and 53% of adjunct/contingent faculty make less than that. One in three fall under the poverty line, and a quarter rely on public assistance.

Full Professors, sometimes called Ordinary Professors, the elite 9% of all college teachers, do average about $140,000 per year, though ranging from $51,000 at a religiously affiliated baccalaureate college to $202,000 at a private doctoral granting R1.

The most recent Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession from the AAUP does indicate that the percentage of faculty who are contingent is down, to 63% - which is lower than my approximated 75% from memory - but which also indicates that this group suffered the most layoffs in recent years.

This 63% is the group that not only is paid criminally low rates, but has no benefits and often cannot even get unemployment assistance when laid off unexpectedly, and bore the greatest impact during the pandemic.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median salary for the tenured and tenure track group ranks at $78,000, which is higher than the $61K I had pulled from memory (also probably a few years old). That’s the median salary of 37% of college teachers.

So, updating what I had estimated earlier from memory, based on the latest reports, the actual average median salary of a “college/university teacher” as of 2020 in the U.S. is $46,500. Which is, even in absolute numbers, actually slightly lower that it was thirty years ago (in 1990, it was $47,000). Adjusted for inflation, it is less than half of what it was ($98,000). And even if the 1990 number only counted tenured and tenure track faculty (which is not clear), adjusted for inflation, the median, tenure/tenure track professor makes less than 80% of what they did 30 years ago.

This much lower overall median pay largely due to the vast increase in the number of poorly paid adjuncts/contingent faculty. (And we have to remember that many of them are not actually given full time work, and even these lower end numbers are extrapolated, so it is not as if they are actually bringing in that much each year, but that that is what it would be if and when they get a full teaching load.)

It is also lower than the median salary for high school teachers, at $62,000.

So, it isn’t quite as bad as I thought, but it is still really terrible. Especially for the adjunct/contingent faculty.