The NSOPF supplies 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 for faculty in the health sciences and, at some institutions, the biological sciences, on the one hand, and for faculty in all other fields, on the other. While Humanities Indicators Project staff are in the process of devising a means of adjusting the data to compensate for these differences, this indicator provides data on the sums faculty reported having been paid by their institutions over the course of the 2003 calendar year.

As Figure III-14a illustrates, full-time humanities faculty, with median total earnings from employment of $61,852 in 2003 (2007 dollars), had the lowest income relative to faculty in other fields. This low figure is a result not only of the relatively small salaries humanities faculty tend to be paid by their institutions but also of their limited ability, compared to their counterparts in certain other fields, to earn additional income from other sources. In fact, although median reported earnings from employment outside academic institutions were by no means high in any field, this additional income was not only highest in the fine arts—the field with the lowest institutional income—but also sufficient to make total 2003 earnings for fine arts faculty higher than that of faculty in the humanities.

Figure III-14a, Full Size Supporting Data

Figure III-14b focuses specifically on institutional salaries for three ranks of faculty: full professor, associate professor, and assistant professor. In 2004, the median annual salary of full professors in the humanities was $78,900 placing them, along with education faculty, second from the bottom of the field rankings. Although humanities faculty salaries were somewhat higher than those in the fine arts, not only were these salaries more than $37,000 lower than those of full professors in the health sciences, who were the top earners among postsecondary professors, but also the earnings of full professors in the humanities were somewhat less than those of associate professors in engineering, health sciences, and business. Assistant and associate professors in the humanities fared similarly to full professors, receiving lower salaries, on average, than their counterparts in every other field except, once again, the fine arts.

Figure III-14b, Full Size Supporting Data

Once they have been adjusted for inflation, the data reveal that while most humanities faculty salaries dipped slightly in the early 1990s, salaries at all faculty ranks increased during the following decade (Figure III-14c). The net increase between 1987 and 2003 was somewhat greater for assistant and associate professors, whose median salaries rose approximately 5%, than for full professors, whose salaries rose only 3% over the same period.

Figure III-14c, Full Size Supporting Data

Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines Faculty For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators, a faculty member is defined as an employee of a two-year or four-year college or a university who teaches credit-earning courses and who may also perform research activities. Faculty thus include not only individuals who have faculty status in their institutions but also those who are classified as instructional staff by their employers. Faculty exclude those individuals whose duties are purely research oriented (even though such individuals may be classified as faculty by their institutions). Classification of Academic Disciplines The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the collector of the data on which the first indicator in this section is based (III-9, Number of Humanities Faculty) sorts postsecondary faculty by academic discipline, using a scheme that includes six humanities-related categories. Five of these have been combined by the Humanities Indicators for the purposes of estimating humanities faculty employment. They include: English Language and Literature Foreign Languages and Literatures History Philosophy and Religion Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies The sixth BLS category, Arts, Drama, and Music, does not distinguish between faculty who teach the academic study of the arts (treated by the Humanities Indicators as a humanities activity) and those who teach studio and performing arts. Consequently, faculty teaching the history and criticism of the fine arts and film are not included in the estimate of the number of humanities faculty. The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), the source of the data for the other indicators in this section, conceptualizes the humanities somewhat more narrowly than does the Humanities Indicators, including only those individuals teaching English, foreign languages, history, philosophy, and religion. Additionally, the NSOPF treats computer science as a natural science (although the Humanities Indicators considers this discipline to be part of the engineering field and classifies it as such for the purposes of the other indicators). Back to Content

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