The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened higher education’s already-dire economic crisis. Moreover, “shared governance and academic freedom” face an “existential threat,” according to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
“Decades of divestment and chronic underfunding at the state and federal level have brought higher education to a precarious tipping point,” said Dr. Irene Mulvey, president of AAUP and a mathematics professor at Fairfield University.
The analysis, titled the “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession,” looked at three previous AAUP studies, including its April 2021 Faculty Compensation Survey, which collected data from almost 380,000 full-time faculty members at 929 institutions.
Among AAUP’s findings are that over two-thirds (67.9%) of institutions surveyed saw full-time faculty’s real wages decline in 2020-21 (after adjusting for inflation). And more than half, or 55 percent, of the report’s 929 institutions froze salaries or reduced wages in response to the pandemic. Additionally, over a quarter cut or reduced fringe benefits. Indeed, real wages for full-time faculty this past year declined for the first time since the Great Recession, according to AAUP.
The report points to four main, compounding factors of this crisis: declining state and federal fiscal support, increasing overreliance on contingent faculty (i.e. non-tenure track, or adjunct, professors), growing administrative staff and salaries, and mounting institutional debt.
But not all faculty or institutions suffered blows this year, the report reveals. The country’s few highly selective, well-endowed research universities mostly enjoyed gains during COVID-19 with an increase in student enrollment and faculty employment as well as a larger endowment. The report cautions against examining its averages or totals alone, which distort the reality of the pandemic’s unequal toll on higher education.
“Most colleges and universities in this country are not the large, prestigious research institutions that fared well. For the rest of us, times are tough,” said the report’s author Glenn Colby, a senior researcher for AAUP.
