analysis of payroll data at the nation's four-year colleges and universities identified more than 1,000 schools that cut jobs and payroll from their teaching ranks during the first full-year of the pandemic. A net 5,000 positions and around $100 million in salaries were eliminated by public and private schools in the fiscal year that ended in June of 2021, the latest reporting period available at the U.S. Department of Education.
In total, 1,717 schools employed about 502,000 full-time, non-medical instructional staff last year, with a total payroll of $48.4 billion. While down year-over-year, those figures were improvements over the 492,000 instructional staffers and $44 billion in payroll logged five years earlier in the 2016-17 academic year, according to DOE.
Two schools — California Institute of Technology and Harvard University — averaged more than $200,000 in salary for non-medical instructional staff in 2021, paying $220,246 and $204,321 per full-time employee, respectively. Another 20 schools topped the $150,000 threshold, while the median among all colleges and universities analyzed was $73,837.
Among nonprofit and for-profit private schools, the median salary per instructor was about the same at roughly $71,000. At public universities, the median was just over $76,000. The DOE defines non-medical instructional staff as full-time employees engaged solely in classroom teaching or a combination of teaching, research and public service.
Many campuses resorted to job cuts during the depths of the pandemic. A total of 1,048 schools — roughly 61% of all colleges and universities analyzed by— eliminated instructional staff in 2021. That cohort cut 13,220 positions in total, or 13 teaching positions per school. Conversely, 562 schools added positions last year, hiring a total of 7,800 non-medical instructional staffers during that same academic year.