The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 2008, Wednesday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 5, 2008, Wednesday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

College Too Pricey? Don't Blame Faculty Pay
Professors' salaries are a big part of budgets but are not the big driver of tuition increases

By ROBIN WILSON

During a debate among the Democratic presidential candidates at Saint Anselm College in January, Charles Gibson, the moderator, used what he thought was a realistic example of a two-career academic couple at the small college in New Hampshire. Between them, he ventured during a discussion about tax policies, they would earn about $200,000 a year.

The audience met Mr. Gibson's statement with laughter and guffaws. Even some of the candidates told him he was off base — and they were right. On average, tenured associate professors at Saint Anselm earned around $65,000 last year. For young assistant professors, the pay was closer to $50,000.

The TV anchor apparently is not the only one who envisions professors as among the well-heeled. When The Chronicle videotaped interviews with ordinary people on the streets in Washington this fall, asking them what accounted for large increases in college tuition, many pointed at faculty salaries. "It's the rising costs of tenured faculty and all that stuff," said one woman.

So, what is the truth about faculty pay?

First, it varies wildly according to discipline and by what kind of institution is cutting the paycheck: public or private, two-year or four-year. Second, although some faculty members earn enough to qualify as rich, the vast majority do not.

Professors in disciplines like finance do quite well, earning as much as $406,781 a year, according to a 2007 survey of 100 major public institutions by Oklahoma State University. But in that same survey, English professors earned $67,931 on average.

"People hear of a few very high salaries because that's very newsworthy," says Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. "There aren't so many of those well-off professors as people think."

Still, the association is well aware that the public — and some legislators — believe there is a direct correlation between faculty salaries and rising college tuition. The AAUP spent time trying to punch holes in that notion, without much success.

In a 2004 report called "Don't Blame Faculty for High Tuition," the association said that on average, tuition and fees at public colleges increased by more than double the rate of faculty-salary increases between 1990 and 2003. Tuition rose 6.6 percent per year, on average, while faculty pay rose by only 3.2 percent per year.

"If tuition and fee increases had been held to the rate of average faculty-salary increases during this period," the AAUP report said, "average tuition and fees would be substantially lower today."

Doctors, Lawyers, Professors

Compared with average Americans, professors are well off. While the average full-time faculty member earned about $75,000 last year, the median household income in the United States was just over $50,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But compared with other professionals with advanced degrees, faculty members don't fare as well. Indeed, professors are fond of saying that no one else with as much education earns as little as they do.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, the average person with a professional graduate degree earned $123,141 last year. That is almost $50,000 more than the average professor.

Part of the problem is that faculty pay has barely kept pace with inflation over the past couple of decades. In real terms, professors earn about the same as they did 20 years ago. From 1986 to 2005, faculty pay grew by only a quarter of a percentage point, adjusted for inflation. Physicians, by contrast, saw their incomes rise by 34 percent, on average, above inflation, and lawyers by 18 percent.

Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University who studies the professoriate, knows firsthand what it is like to be outstripped by other professionals. He has been a professor for nearly 30 years, and his salary of $120,000 puts him at the high end of the pay scale for faculty members in his field. But last year, one of his colleague's daughters took her newly minted law degree to a top-notch firm in Newark, N.J., where she immediately began earning as much as Mr. Finkelstein.

"In terms of the potential for salary growth after the entry level, the multiples are much greater in law, medicine, and business than they are in higher education," says Mr. Finkelstein. "But I like my job better than most lawyers that I know, because I don't have to worry about billable hours, for one thing."

While faculty members are falling behind other professionals, their raises are also among the smallest on their own campuses. From 1995 to 2005, presidential salaries rose at more than six times the rate that faculty salaries did, according to the AAUP. Faculty pay raises have lagged behind those of campus chief financial officers and chief academic officers, as well.

Faculty salaries do account for the largest single chunk of higher education's recurring annual expenditures. The Commonfund Institute has found that 35.4 percent of the money that colleges spend on regular expenses each year goes to pay professors, compared with about 10 percent to administrative salaries. But some faculty members say "administrative bloat" is a bigger driver of increasing tuition than is faculty pay. The AAUP's 2008 faculty-salary report points out that from 1976 to 2005, the number of full-time college administrators (vice presidents and deans, for example), rose by 101 percent, while the number of full-time nonfaculty professionals (in student services, development, and information technology, for example) rose by 281 percent. Over the same period, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members rose by only 17 percent.

Most telling, however, is that the number of part-time faculty members during those years rose by 214 percent. Over the past couple of decades, colleges have been replacing tenured faculty members when they retire with much less expensive nontenure-track professors, many of whom are paid by the course and do not receive health insurance. Nearly 70 percent of faculty members now work off the tenure track, either on yearly contracts or as adjuncts teaching course by course. As the number of the highest-paid professors in higher education declines, spending on faculty members is expected to drop.

"Given that academia is increasingly staffed by adjuncts and full-time, nontenure-track faculty, all of whom are less expensive, and given that the tenured and tenure-track faculty salaries went up by less than one percentage point over the last 20 years, it is a mathematical impossibility for rising faculty salaries to be driving higher tuition," says Saranna Thornton, a professor and chair of the economics department at Hampden-Sydney College.

Ms. Thornton completed the report on the AAUP's faculty salary survey this year. She doesn't want to say exactly what she earns, but she says it is in line with the average pay of full professors at private, liberal-arts colleges like hers — about $94,000 last year.

That might sound like a lot, but Ms. Thornton is raising four children on her own. She drives an eight-year-old minivan and owns a modest home in rural Virginia, where housing costs are relatively low. Her idea of a vacation? A one-day trip to Disney World last summer with just one of her kids, thanks to the generosity of her mother and brother, who covered the airfares and park admissions.

"Compared to the average American, I'm well off," says Ms. Thornton. "I'm not going to pretend I'm middle class. But I'm not jet-setting off to the Caribbean on spring break."

Mowing the Lawn at 3 p.m.

Even though the numbers refute the public's perception that high-priced professors are driving up college costs, what is encouraging people to believe that?

Probably the fact that the life of a college professor looks luxurious to those who work 9 to 5. After all, unlike most people, tenured faculty members have jobs for life, spend only a few hours a week in the classroom, and jet off to foreign countries on sabbatical leaves every few years, right?

"The average guy is worrying about his job and he looks out his window on a Wednesday at 3 p.m. and the professor is mowing his lawn," says Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University. "People don't really understand higher education, and they are a little resentful."

What the guy next door might not see, though, is that the professor is up writing a journal article or grading papers at 2 a.m. A survey by the U.S. Department of Education has found that professors said they worked an average of 53.4 hours per week. About 40 percent of their time was spent outside the classroom, on research and administrative tasks.

If faculty salaries aren't the chief reason for rising tuition, what is? The AAUP's 2004 report ventured a few guesses. "The bottom line is that although faculty and staff salary increases obviously contribute to increases in tuition, other factors have played more important roles during the last quarter century," it said. It blamed the rising cost of benefits, reductions in state support for public colleges, and the growing expenses of financial aid and information technology.

Higher-education experts tick off a list of other factors. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, calls one of them "the quest to be the best in everything you can do." That means adding expensive programs and buildings.

Other observers point to the rising cost of energy, plus the scramble to offer expensive new recreation centers and residence halls.

"If students come on your campus and you don't have the latest dining hall, the biggest stadium, they don't want to come," says Dennis M. Sweetland, a professor of theology at Saint Anselm, who heads the campus chapter of the AAUP. "Then they complain about the cost and about faculty raises, when in reality we probably make less than their parents."

Students at many colleges have it so good they will be in for a shock when it is time for them to leave, Mr. Sweetland says. "A lot of us joke that we have such nice student housing that when these students graduate, they are going to see downward mobility."

For some faculty members at Saint Anselm, it's another story. A few years ago, for the first time, the college agreed to rent an off-campus house it owned to a new professor who wanted to work there but couldn't afford to buy a home near the campus, only an hour from Boston. The professor rented from the college for three years and saved up money. He recently moved into a place of his own.