The Coalition for Carolina recently noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has dropped out of the top-10 “average adjusted faculty salary” rankings for the 2023-24 academic year, as measured against a select group of peer institutions. The implication from the announcement is that this is a bad thing. “We should demand to see our faculty in the top 10 in salaries, respect and shared governance,” the progressive organization declared. “It is concerning, because the quality of our faculty determines the quality of the University and the quality of education that students receive.”
Complaints about faculty salaries from within the academy often imply that lower pay means a lower commitment to teaching from the state or institution—or that the quality of instruction will decline as a result. To be clear, UNC’s nominal salaries, as calculated by a recent AAUP survey, have not declined. In fact, for the period shown (2010-11 through 2023-24), average adjusted salaries are up 27 percent. The complaint is that they haven’t risen as much as salaries at some of UNC’s “peer” institutions.
Implying that institutional lack of commitment is driving faculty salaries ignores the powerful workings of the labor market.There are two problems with this facile view of faculty salaries. First, faculty pay is complicated by many factors, so that averaging salaries and comparing them across disparate institutions (even if you consider those institutions a “peer group”) is almost meaningless. Second, wages and salaries in a free-market labor system respond to various market forces and rise and fall according to how those forces operate. Implying that some institutional lack of commitment is driving faculty salaries ignores the powerful workings of the labor market.
In a free-market labor system, falling or stagnant salaries are the result of a combination of lagging demand for the product, lower productivity, or increased labor competition. Let’s look at some market forces that might be keeping UNC wages from growing as quickly as those of some peers.
To begin with, the demand for the product (the educational experience offered by UNC) is going to determine how many faculty the university needs. The growth of the undergraduate population in the UNC System has been slow: a seven-percent increase since the 2014-15 academic year, which is less than one-percent growth per year. UNC-Chapel Hill has grown only slightly faster (13 percent since 2014-15). Moreover, the number of North Carolina high-school graduates is expected to peak in 2026. This is not a scenario in which UNC should be scrambling to hire scarce faculty to meet swiftly growing needs.
Also affecting the demand side of the faculty labor market is the cost crisis affecting higher education, which is forcing institutions to make decisions to hold down the costs of their largest expense, salaries. As I pointed out in my Martin Center article last year,
In 2020, the Hechinger Report conducted a “financial stress test” on more than 2,600 institutions and reported that 500 of them exhibited financial warning signs. The Covid pandemic only made that stress worse. Mergers and failures are up significantly in the past few years. Between the 2017-18 and 2020-21 academic years, 579 institutions closed or merged, representing 8.7 percent of the total.
The need to control costs is going to tamp down demand for faculty generally, will hasten the transition to non-tenure-track and piece-rate (adjunct) faculty, and could lead to slower growth or even a decline in salaries paid to faculty. In fact, the AAUP indicates that this is already happening, since “from 2019-20 to 2023-24, nominal average full-time faculty salaries increased 10.9 percent, but real salaries decreased 7.1 percent after adjusting for inflation.” Note that this is a recent phenomenon—inflation-adjusted salaries have dropped only since 2020. In the 20 years prior to that, real salaries rose by 20 percent. This trend is affecting many of UNC’s peers, though institutions with large endowments and deep-pocketed donors and legislatures are not going to feel as burdened by cost controls and are going to outcompete other institutions for the most desirable faculty. Despite its recent comparative-salary slide, UNC will still be doing a great deal of that.
It’s not just the demand side that is affecting faculty salaries. On the supply side, there is more competition from prospective faculty (too many new Ph.D.s) seeking faculty jobs. According to Inside Higher Ed,
Every year, in almost every discipline, newly minted Ph.D.s outnumber tenure-track job postings by a substantial margin. While that trend has gone on for decades, most Ph.D. programs continue to maintain or even increase student enrollments and remain structured as a form of academic career training. Thus, growing numbers of Ph.D. graduates are trained for, and often expect, an academic career that’s not available to them.
Greater competition for limited faculty positions is going to drive wages down in general. If UNC has more “assistant” and non-tenure-track faculty than its peers, then their average salaries are going to rise more slowly. Additionally, more productive workers should get higher salaries, but measuring productivity in academia is difficult. Across institutions, it has been mostly flat for decades, as I pointed out in my article last year. To the extent that UNC is shrinking class sizes and relying less on productivity-enhancing measures like online classes, its salaries could be affected by lagging productivity. Critics would be wise to check on how these factors are impacting salaries at UNC before suggesting that a lack of commitment to education is the cause of the university’s payroll falling behind that of its peers.
Averaging faculty salaries makes for an interesting talking point, but it doesn’t impart a lot of important information.While any or all of the above factors could be responsible for the relative performance of UNC faculty salaries, measuring faculty pay is complicated by a complex rank structure, tenure, and a degree of organizational capture due to faculty participation in institutional governance. Averaging salaries makes for an interesting talking point, but it doesn’t impart a lot of important information.
The faculty-rank structure within universities means that there are at least four distinct salary structures, so averaging them in aggregate makes little sense. According to the latest AAUP survey, full-professor salaries (at Doctoral institutions) are 1.7 times higher than assistant-professor salaries and 2.2 times higher than lecturer salaries. The difference between highest- and lowest-paid tenure-track-professor salaries is roughly two-to-one.
Salaries across disciplines are also quite different, so the rank structure also gets crosshatched with salaries from various disciplines to create more than 100 distinct salary structures at institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill. Comparing an assistant professor in the history department to a full professor in the law school is not going to tell you much about aggregate faculty salaries. According to the 2019-20 CUPA salary survey, the average salary for a law professor was $174K, compared to $103K for an English professor.
Another trend in higher-education faculty composition is the shift to fewer tenure-track and more part-time faculty. Part-time faculty members make up just under half (48.7 percent) of the academic workforce. According to an AAUP survey, in 2022-23, part-time faculty members “earned an average of $3,903 per three-credit course section. When adjusted for inflation, the rate represents a 5% pay decline from the 2019-20 academic year.” It doesn’t take the substitution of many adjunct faculty for tenure-track faculty to lower a system’s aggregate salaries. The same article points out that “contingent faculty, who lack tenure protections, now make up 67.7% of nonmedical faculty appointments.” To the extent that UNC has a higher concentration of faculty in lower-cost disciplines and at lower ranks, their salaries would necessarily fall behind their peers.
Finally, it could be that UNC is measuring itself against the wrong peer group. The peer group in the announcement includes some institutions that are among the largest endowment holders in the country (both public and private). Several members of the peer group—Duke, Emory, and Northwestern—have endowments among the top-20 largest in the country. Texas, UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Virginia are in the top five of the largest public-university endowments. UNC-Chapel Hill has $5.1 billion as of fiscal year 2023, but this pales in comparison to Texas’s $18.8 billion and Duke’s $13.2 billion. Trying to align salary expenditures with such uber-wealthy institutions seems like a fool’s errand. Overall, across all institutions surveyed by the AAUP, the average salary for the 2023-24 academic year is $112,000. The UNC average ($138,000) is 23 percent higher than the national average. Perhaps critics could celebrate that instead of complaining about UNC’s not keeping up with Duke and Northwestern.
The bottom line is that any measure of aggregate faculty salaries across institutions and systems is never going to be “apples to apples.” Such measurements are not a good guide to making important institutional decisions.
Chris Corrigan was Chief Financial Officer at Andrew College (1998-2005), Emory College (2005-2008), and Armstrong State University (2015-2017).