The American Association of University Professors released its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession last month. It is grim. For one thing, real wages (i.e., wages adjusted for inflation) actually decreased for the first time in over a decade. And that’s wages for full-time faculty. Second, 63% of faculty are contingent (i.e., on fixed-term contracts rather than on a tenure-track or tenured). Third, the average pay for part-time contingent faculty (i.e., adjunct professors) is $3552 per course. For most schools, a typical full-time teaching load is two or three courses, meaning that the adjunct who is lucky enough to cobble together a full teaching load can expect an average annual salary of $14,208 to $21,312, without benefits of course. I myself have managed to get three courses at The Cooper Union, at $3000 per course, though fortunately this is not my only revenue stream at present and I get benefits from my wife’s job. But if I were unmarried or saddled with massive student debt, I’d probably be living with my parents or out of academia altogether.
I mention this because when I was a student, I never thought about how much professors make, because a) I didn’t even know about the existence of contingent faculty, and b) I thought I didn’t need much money, so salary was unimportant. I’m sure other students considering grad school in archaeology are similarly uninformed, so I offer this report as an antidote to such misapprehensions. Some people do get lucky, but for most academia is a slow road to financial ruin.