Changes and Errata
Updated December 5, 2023
What changes were made to the 2023-24 Faculty Compensation Survey?
All survey forms were reformatted and many item labels were revised for consistency and clarity. Key concepts are now listed at the top of each form. Each survey form now includes a “Comments” item for respondents to provide context to FCS staff. Survey instructions were reorganized for consistency and clarity. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are now provided explicitly in the instructions for each survey form.
Form 1: The “Add Comments” field was removed. An “Appendix III Footnote” field was added so that Appendix III footnotes for part-time faculty pay are separated from general publication footnotes (Appendices I & II).
Form 2: A field was added for respondents to indicate whether any extreme outliers were excluded, per long-standing FCS instructions.
Form 3: Under the Dependent Tuition Benefits section, the “Institution is a member of Tuition Exchange” field was changed to “Competitive scholarship programs, such as Tuition Exchange.”
Form 6: Inclusion criteria were modified to include part-time faculty members who taught distance-learning (online or remote) course sections, unless they were paid on a different scale from those who taught in-person course sections.
What changes were made to the 2022-23 Faculty Compensation Survey?
There were no changes to the survey in 2022-23.
What changes were made to the 2021-22 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Form 1: The Carnegie Classification field has been removed because the information is readily available from IPEDS.
Form 6: The Calendar System field was removed because the information is readily available from IPEDS.
What changes were made to the 2020-21 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Form 3: Based on responses collected during the 2019-20 survey, the dependent tuition benefits section now includes several fields to better characterize dependent tuition benefits provided to faculty members. In addition, there is now one dependent tuition benefits section that applies to all full-time faculty rather than having separate sections for faculty on 9- and 10-month contracts and faculty on 11- or 12-month contracts.
What changes were made to the 2019-20 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Several fields have been removed from Form 1: Institutional Information to simplify the form and eliminate historically unused fields.
Form 3: Full-Time Faculty Benefits underwent significant changes and the reporting fields were reduced to retirement, health insurance, and tuition. The two remaining numerical indicators are institutional retirement contribution (excluding unfunded retirement liability, prepaid retiree health insurance, and social security) and health insurance premiums (combining medical, dental, and other healthcare, but excluding long-term disability, Medicare, and life insurance). Each of these are collected with cells for dollars and number participating. They are reported as aggregates for all ranks combined, broken out by contract length. In addition, we are collecting dependent tuition benefits as a categorical variable only. The categories are: Full tuition waiver at this institution; Partial tuition waiver at this institution; Full tuition waiver at specified institutions through a consortium; Partial tuition waiver at specified institutions through a consortium; Other (with an open-text response field); and None. These changes simplify the form and reduce the reporting burden on institutions in addition to providing more accurate data for analysis.
Form 6: Part-Time Faculty Salary only collects data related to part-time faculty and does not include graduate teaching assistants. The data collection fields remain the same as the previous year, with the exclusion of graduate teaching assistants. The graduate teaching assistant data was too inconsistent for inclusion in the 2018-19 annual report, so the AAUP Research Office has opted to remove it for the 2019-20 data collection.
What changes were made to the 2018-19 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Substantive changes were made to Form 6: Part-Time Faculty Salary. The form asked users for data related to part-time faculty and, for the first time, graduate teaching assistants. Users were asked to submit data for the prior academic year, 2017-18, to ease the reporting burden on institutions. Appendix III was produced to show each institution’s data individually.
What changes were made to the 2017-18 Faculty Compensation Survey?
The survey forms remained the same as the 2016-17 Faculty Compensation Survey.
Erratum for the 2017-18 Survey
There was a problem in our publication process for the production of benefits and compensation data. The corrected compensation and total benefits as a percentage of salary are reported here:
A description of the error is included here:
What changes were made to the 2016-17 Faculty Compensation Survey?
The only change to the 2016 - 2017 Faculty Compensation Survey was to include "Part-Time Faculty Per Section" on Form 6. In the rows, "Part-Time Faculty Per Section," include all individuals that taught part-time on a per section basis. Include all organized class sections that meet at regularly scheduled intervals and individualized class sections that are associated with degree production. Do not include non-degree granting or remedial class sections.
Why were changes made to the 2015-16 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Over the past decade, the higher education landscape has changed substantially. Specifically, there has been an increase in full-time faculty reported under “Instructional/Research/Public Service” rather than primarily “Instructional.” Perhaps most striking has been the increase in part-time instructional staff, which now comprises approximately 45% of the academic labor force. In an effort to better capture the changing academic labor force, the AAUP Research Office conducted a survey of faculty, administrators, and higher education professionals in the Summer and Fall of 2015 to better understand the current utility of the Faculty Compensation Survey and to assess proposed changes.
Based upon the thousands of responses received, and in consultation with many diverse constituencies within higher education, it was clear that the AAUP Research Office that the Faculty Compensation Survey could be improved through changes in four major areas: (1) the collection of part-time instructional faculty and Graduate Teaching Assistants, (2) conceptual clarification of what faculty to include and exclude, (3) uniform clarification of where to include faculty captured and (4) the elimination of faculty salary distribution data.
What changes were made to the 2015-16 Faculty Compensation Survey?
Detailed explanations of part-time instructional faculty and Graduate Teaching Assistants may be found under "Instructions" and "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)" pages. Clarification on what to include and exclude may be found under "Instructions". Additional clarification of where to include full-time faculty may be found in the document "Faculty Reporting Categories" which may be accessed by clicking here. Faculty salary distribution data was eliminated for the 2015 - 2016 Faculty Compensation Survey as those data were labor intensive to collect and did not provide a great deal of utility for benchmarking or institutional planning.
