Half of N.Y. colleges pay profs less than $100K

WASHINGTON – Full professors earn an average $223,000 at Columbia University and $169,000 at Cornell University, but half of New York colleges pay professors less than $100,000.

That's among findings in a survey released Monday by the American Association of University Professors.

Nationwide, faculty salaries rose only 1.4 percent in the current 2014-15 academic year compared to a year earlier, the survey found.

During the six academic years since the onset of the Great Recession, inflation-adjusted faculty salaries have declined by about one-tenth of one percentage point.

The AAUP says its survey debunks the belief that faculty salaries are behind the escalating cost of higher education. Instead, it says declining state aid to public universities is the major culprit.

State aid for public colleges and universities has fallen 16.6 percent nationwide since the 2008-2009 academic year, according to John Barnshaw, senior higher education researcher at the AAUP and a coauthor of the survey.

He said students are paying about 6.5 percent more in tuition after grants and other financial aid are taken into account.

State aid to the State University of New York system's four year colleges and universities has declined about 29 percent between the 2008-2009 academic year and the upcoming 2015-2016 term — from $986.3 million to $699.1 million.

State aid to New York's community colleges has increased from $452.1 million to $466.7 million over the same period, but that hasn't kept pace with an enrollment increase of 10,694 students. State aid per student has dropped $78, or about 3 percent.

On the faculty side, the average salary for full professors at half of the 100 schools in New York recently surveyed by the AAUP is less than $100,000. Those salaries range from $93,900 at SUNY Purchase College to $88,000 at SUNY Oneonta and $88,800 at Canisius College in Buffalo.

Many of the others listed as paying full professors under $100,000 are community colleges and SUNY four-year colleges.

Average pay for full professors at the major SUNY research universities — Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo and Stony Brook — exceeds $100,000.

Many colleges, such as St. Bonaventure, Elmira College and the colleges in the City University of New York system, missed the Jan. 31 deadline for submitting information to AAUP.

Of those that did submit information, seven of the 10 that pay full professors the most have their main campuses in New York City, where the cost of living is the highest. In addition to Columbia (No. 1) and NYU (No. 2), those schools are Yeshiva, Fordham, St. John's, Barnard and the New School.

The two upstate universities in the top 10 are Cornell (No. 3) and the University of Rochester (No. 8). Average pay for full professors is $169,500 at Cornell and $150,300 at UR. Cornell also has campuses for its medical school and an applied sciences program located in Manhattan.

Salaries for full professors vary based on academic discipline. Those teaching science, medicine, law and business earn more than those teaching English literature, history and other humanities courses.

Colleges and universities usually pay less than the private sector for professionals such as pharmacists, research physicists, economists, mathematicians, lawyers and architectural engineers, the AAUP survey found, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Architectural engineers earn a mean salary of $136,140 in nonacademic settings but only $106,540 at colleges and universities.

Salaries paid to full professors represent only a small segment of personnel costs at colleges and universities.

Full professors make up about 10 percent of college faculty nationwide, according to AAUP's Barnshaw.

In fact, tenured faculty and other full-time faculty on a tenure track, such as associate professors and assistant professors, represent only 26.9 percent of faculty.

The picture was different in 1975, when about 45 percent of college faculty were on track for tenure or had achieved it already.

Today, the vast majority of faculty are not on a tenure track or are part-time faculty members, adjuncts or graduate teaching assistants.

"The traditional adjunct is someone who had a full-time job, had experience in a field and would teach a class in that area based on their experience," said Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor in higher education at Seton Hall University. "What we are seeing more of now, is basically full time adjuncts who are working multiple schools to make ends meet, because they are earning $3,000 or $4,000 per class without benefits."

"Colleges have done more than they should to cut faculty costs," said Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a research professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development.

The area where college and university personnel costs have climbed, Baum said, is administration.

"It used to be that you had support staff like secretaries," she said. "But now, instead of the secretary you have a lot of computer support people and people dealing with regulations and record- keeping and diversity and things that are more professional jobs. And they frequently count as part of administration."

Follow Brian Tumulty on Twitter @nyindc.

Average NY professor salaries

2014-2015 average salaries at New York colleges and universities

Full professor / Tenure-track faculty (includes assistant and associate professors)

1. $223,900 / $169,200 Columbia University

2. $196,900 / $125,400 New York University

3. $169,500 / $132,600 Cornell University

4. $164,600 / $112,100 Yeshiva University

5. $159,800 / $117,300 Fordham University

6. $155,000 / $118,800 St. John's University

7. $154,100 / $109,700 Barnard College

8. $150,300 / $117,300 University of Rochester

9. $148,800 / $94,800 The New School

10. $148,100 / $107,300 SUNY Stony Brook

11. $146,700 / $117,300 Hofstra University

12. $140,000 / $103,100 Colgate University

13. $136,900 / $109,400 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

14. $134,600 / $104,800 New York Institute of Technology-Old Westbury

15. $133,300 / $100,900 University at Buffalo

16. $132,600 / $96,800 SUNY Brooklyn Health Science Center

17. $132,400 / $104,800 Adelphi University

18. $132,200 / $106,100 Hamilton College

19. $131,800 / $105,900 Pace University

20. $131,300 / $101,500 Vassar College

21. $131,100 / $100,600 Bard College

22. $129,700 / $99,600 SUNY College of Optometry

23. $128,500 / $91,700 Binghamton University

24. $127,700 / $100,700 Syracuse University

25. $126,400 / $96,200 SUNY College Tech-Utica-Rome

26. $125,300 / $92,500 SUNY Albany

27. $122,500 / $98,300 Union College

28. $120,100 / $94,200 Clarkson University

29. $119,200 / $87,500 Rochester Institute of Technology

30. $118,500 / $96,300 Westchester Community College

31. $118,300 / $108,600 Cooper Union

32. $116,900 / $94,400 Skidmore College

33. $116,800 / $80,400 Marist College

34. $114,300 / $84,300 Hobart & William Smith Colleges

35. $113,700 / $95,000 Long Island University

36. $113,100 / $91,700 Suffolk County Community College

37. $112,500 / $89,800 Manhattan College

38. $109,700 / $90,200 Molloy College

39. $109,700 / $87,300 St. Lawrence College

40. $107,900 / $83,900 Iona College

41. $106,600 / $78,500 Saint Joseph's College

42. $105,900 / $87,300 Sarah Lawrence College

43. $103,500 / $82,300 SUNY College-Old Westbury

44. $102,400 / $82,600 College of New Rochelle

45. $102,400 / $77,100 St. John Fisher College

46. $102,200 / $81,000 Farmingdale State College

47. $101,000 / $81,800 Siena College

48. $100,900 / $80,300 Le Moyne College

49. $100,500 / $77,100 Ithaca College

50. $100,100 / $83,800 SUNY College-Environmental Science & Forestry

Source: American Association of University Professors