Figure

Median Salary of Full-Time Professors, by Rank and Primary Teaching Field, 2003

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (2004); data accessed and analyzed via NCES’s online Data Analysis System at http://nces.ed.gov/das/. Salary figures were converted from 2003 to 2007 dollars using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) produced by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
See the [noteOnLink linkId='335']Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines[/noteOnLink]. The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) was last administered in 2004. The NSOPF—the source of the data for Indicators III-10 to III-15, all of which deal with the characteristics of the nation’s humanities professoriate—has been suspended indefinitely by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics. The only remaining source of nationally representative data on the postsecondary humanities faculty is the American Academy of Art and Sciences–sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS). The HDS provides a variety of data on humanities faculty members and their teaching loads (as well as different aspects of the student experience), but it does not supply the sort of information on faculty earnings, racial composition, institutional distribution, or job satisfaction that was available from the NSOPF. The NSOPF supplied a variety of earnings data for college and university faculty. However, such data are difficult to use for the purposes of comparison across academic fields because of differences in the pay structure that obtain, on the one hand, for faculty in the health sciences and, at some institutions, the biological sciences and, on the other hand, for faculty in all other fields.
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