Psychology faculty earn less than faculty in similar disciplines

• In 2018, the median salaries for tenured/tenure-track psychology faculty were $62,071 for assistant professors, $71,483 for associate professors and $88,894 for full professors.^1,2
• That’s less than faculty in other fields. In fact, psychology faculty earn less on the dollar than faculty from other social sciences³ or from other STEM disciplines such as biological sciences. Faculty in other social sciences earn approximately the same median salary as faculty across all disciplines, while faculty in biological sciences are paid well above parity.⁴
• For years, psychology faculty have been paid below parity. Their pay ratio began to decline sharply after the 2008 recession, when budget cuts forced many institutions to decrease or freeze raises; psychology faculty sustained an especially hard hit. Although there was a rebound in 2017 with the pay ratio increasing to 95 cents to the dollar, the pay ratio remains low.

For more information, contact APA’s Center for Workforce Studies at cws@apa.org.

¹ Data are from the CUPA-HR Faculty in Higher Education Survey, which uses IPEDS Classification of Instructional Programs codes to collect data by faculty discipline. Data consist of institutional-level median salaries paid by discipline (for U.S. institutions only). For more information, see www.cupahr.org/surveys/results/faculty-in-higher-educationopens in new window .

² Median salaries for tenured/tenure-track psychology faculty in each academic rank are collapsed across type of institution (i.e., public, private independent and private religious).

³ “Other social sciences” is identified as CIP code 45 in IPEDS and combines the disciplines of political science, economics, sociology, anthropology and geography. For more information on CIP codes, see https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/Defaultopens in new window

⁴ The $1.00 mark is the reference point for what all faculty earn and comes from computing a median salary for tenured/tenure-track faculty salaries combined across all disciplines. The $1.00 reference point in figure 1 is broken out further by academic rank but collapsed across all academic ranks in figure 2. Pay ratios are derived by dividing the median salary of all faculty by the median salary of faculty from the designated discipline.

⁵ Director of Research, CUPA-HR.