Advocate Online - Special Issue

Status of the Profession

This special issue is NEA’s newest service to our higher ed members: a statistical look at the status of the higher education professions. In these pages, you will find data on a host of faculty and staff concerns: salary and benefits, tenure, part-time and full-time employment trends, the effect of collective bargaining on salaries, and a host of other topics, including a public faculty salary report.

In this issue of the Advocate...

Each year the NEA provides a detailed report on faculty salaries in the NEA Higher Education Almanac. The NEA higher education Web site (www.nea.org/he) also contains a section on faculty salaries summarized at the state level.

This edition of the Advocate goes beyond these other publications by providing a more inclusive picture of faculty salaries, along with information on other groups of higher education employees.

The information provided here shows the change in faculty salaries over time and the vicissitudes in real purchasing power. The results also show the variation in faculty salaries by type of institution, state, academic field, and union status. Finally, we look at faculty tenure and benefits to see how they are faring in a time of increasing medical costs and sinking stock markets.

In addition to faculty, this edition of the Advocate looks at higher education staff. Full-time faculty now represent less than one-third of the employees in colleges and universities. In fact, the fastest-growing group of employees is “other professionals.” This group includes anyone who has a college degree, but does not teach. The results help describe the complexity and diversity of the higher education workforce.

This special issue (724 k) and a list of public-sector faculty salaries (295 k) are also provided in Acrobat pdf format.