Advocate Online - Special Issue

Employment Trends in the Academic Professions

This annual issue of the NEA Higher Education Advocate provides data on a number of important areas in higher education employment, including a listing of faculty salaries in the nation’s public colleges and universities.  We also look at employment trends, pension and health benefits issues, and state support for higher education.  This issue features for the first time a comparison of faculty salaries and average family income by state.

In this issue of the Advocate...
Each year NEA provides a detailed report on faculty salaries in the NEA Higher Education Almanac, published each February. The NEA Higher Education Web site also contains a section on faculty salaries summarized by state.

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.

This Special Issue allows you to track the change in faculty salaries over time and the vicissitudes in real purchasing power. We also show the variation in faculty salaries by type of institution, academic field, and union status. Finally, we look at faculty benefits to see how they are faring in a time of increasing medical costs and sinking stock markets.

We also look at higher ed staff. Full-time faculty 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 (786 k) and a list of public-sector faculty salaries (585 k) are also provided in Acrobat pdf format.