Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Double-digit drop in real law professor pay confirmed by second data source (Michael Simkovic)
My previous post presented data showing that law professor pay has declined 24 percent in real terms from 2013 to 2022 using figures from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Report.* Restoring law professor pay to 2013 levels would require at least a 31 percent increase in pay, not counting inflation since 2022.**
Several readers asked whether this extremely large drop in real pay might reflect a change in the relative seniority levels of law professors—for example, more clinicians and legal writing instructors or a higher ratio of junior faculty—rather than a decline in pay for tenured track doctrinal faculty after controlling for seniority.
This optimistic explanation is unlikely according to new data from a second source, the Society of American Law Professors (SALT), presented below. Instead, the BLS data appears to accurately reflect the average decline in law professor real pay. The SALT and BLS data also both suggest variation across schools. SALT provides more granular detail about the full extent of that variation. In the SALT data, a small minority of law schools (less than 15 percent of the sample) even show small increases in real pay for law professors.
Data from SALT confirms the BLS OES’s numbers for the decline in mean and median pay. SALT’s data includes only tenure-track doctrinal faculty broken into three levels of seniority—assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. SALT also provides school-specific data for a relatively large number of reporting schools. Across the three seniority levels, roughly 10 to 20 percent of law schools reported data in both 2012-2013 and 2019-2020. I use only these schools reporting in both years for my analysis to ensure consistency across years (similar to a fixed effects analysis).
BLS’s data from 2022 is more up to date than the most recent SALT data, which comes from 2020. Inflation was extremely high from 2020 to 2022. Law Professors’ real pay dropped 12 percent in 2020 to 2022—as big of a decline in 2 years as in the previous 8. The total decline over the decade was 24 percent. Thus real mean pay dropped from 2013 to 2020 by 12 percent.***
SALT data shows a nearly identical drop from 2012-2013 to 2019-2020 (the most recent data available) of 12 to 13 percent at the mean and median across seniority levels. These figures include both salary and summer stipends.**** Thus, SALT’s figures in the same years are extremely similar to BLS’s.
SALT data suggests substantial heterogeneity across schools in the extent to which pay has fallen behind inflation. Data is not available from SALT for the highest ranked institutions, but anecdotal reports from readers, and my own experience, suggest that pay is both much higher and increases significantly faster at the highest ranked institutions. By contrast, pay for the labor market as a whole has gone up—the social security administrations’ average wage index has increased faster than the consumer price index.
The results from the SALT data are presented below:
Change in Full Professor Real Pay (including summer stipends) from 2013 to 2020
School |
2012-2013 |
2019-2020 |
% Difference |
Washburn |
$215,755 |
$154,219 |
-29% |
Loyola-New Orleans |
$221,825 |
$164,335 |
-26% |
Cal Western |
$262,212 |
$199,399 |
-24% |
Memphis |
$197,988 |
$151,172 |
-24% |
Louisiana State |
$231,897 |
$179,341 |
-23% |
North Dakota |
$187,758 |
$145,375 |
-23% |
South Texas |
$224,253 |
$181,207 |
-19% |
Michigan State |
$225,732 |
$185,941 |
-18% |
Akron |
$196,855 |
$164,454 |
-16% |
Nova Southeastern |
$237,230 |
$198,643 |
-16% |
Indiana-Indianapolis |
$200,456 |
$168,150 |
-16% |
Stetson |
$246,181 |
$209,705 |
-15% |
Mississippi |
$213,690 |
$183,610 |
-14% |
Wayne State |
$227,091 |
$197,245 |
-13% |
Baltimore |
$225,829 |
$196,187 |
-13% |
New Mexico |
$196,352 |
$170,602 |
-13% |
Southern Illinois |
$179,727 |
$156,580 |
-13% |
Texas Tech |
$209,531 |
$184,857 |
-12% |
Florida International |
$248,270 |
$219,040 |
-12% |
Ohio State |
$244,043 |
$218,019 |
-11% |
Kansas |
$239,551 |
$217,346 |
-9% |
Nebraska |
$229,837 |
$211,638 |
-8% |
San Diego |
$267,754 |
$246,775 |
-8% |
CUNY |
$211,759 |
$200,370 |
-5% |
Hawai'i |
$233,961 |
$221,838 |
-5% |
Creighton |
$202,642 |
$192,621 |
-5% |
South Carolina |
$227,861 |
$217,436 |
-5% |
Pacific-McGeorge |
$220,318 |
$217,509 |
-1% |
Kentucky |
$192,176 |
$192,319 |
0% |
Tennessee |
$197,996 |
$201,839 |
2% |
Oklahoma |
$193,397 |
$197,235 |
2% |
Florida |
$262,577 |
$269,499 |
3% |
Oregon |
$200,972 |
$216,485 |
8% |
mean |
-12% |
||
median |
-13% |
||
n_schools |
33 |
||
% of schools with decline |
85% |
||
% of schools with increase |
15% |
Change in Associate Professor Real Pay (including summer stipends) from 2013 to 2020
School |
2012-2013 |
2019-2020 |
% Difference |
Loyola-New Orleans |
$174,221 |
$111,813 |
-36% |
Stetson |
$173,799 |
$135,461 |
-22% |
Kansas |
$181,183 |
$142,892 |
-21% |
Washburn |
$166,393 |
$132,673 |
-20% |
Nova Southeastern |
$179,704 |
$145,275 |
-19% |
Cal Western |
$185,467 |
$160,553 |
-13% |
New Mexico |
$169,349 |
$147,294 |
-13% |
Creighton |
$172,811 |
$152,267 |
-12% |
Oklahoma |
$163,438 |
$150,833 |
-8% |
Baltimore |
$180,493 |
$170,034 |
-6% |
Florida |
$216,732 |
$211,975 |
-2% |
CUNY |
$168,576 |
$166,579 |
-1% |
Akron |
$160,729 |
$160,062 |
0% |
Nebraska |
$166,633 |
$166,409 |
0% |
mean |
-12% |
||
median |
-12% |
||
n_schools |
14 |
||
% of schools with decline |
100% |
||
% of schools with increase |
0% |
Change in Assistant Professor Real Pay (including summer stipends) from 2013 to 2020
School |
2012-2013 |
2019-2020 |
% Difference |
South Carolina |
$192,019 |
$148,612 |
-23% |
Stetson |
$171,185 |
$134,401 |
-21% |
Louisiana State |
$173,387 |
$143,351 |
-17% |
Michigan State |
$181,665 |
$152,525 |
-16% |
Baltimore |
$173,387 |
$148,020 |
-15% |
New Mexico |
$146,965 |
$126,263 |
-14% |
Akron |
$153,551 |
$132,112 |
-14% |
Southern Illinois |
$130,968 |
$112,870 |
-14% |
South Texas |
$140,365 |
$120,988 |
-14% |
North Dakota |
$124,995 |
$109,394 |
-12% |
Ohio State |
$185,922 |
$165,269 |
-11% |
Kentucky |
$169,313 |
$151,316 |
-11% |
Wayne State |
$162,574 |
$147,177 |
-9% |
Florida |
$196,122 |
$177,755 |
-9% |
Memphis |
$135,985 |
$123,281 |
-9% |
Hawai'i |
$174,097 |
$158,179 |
-9% |
CUNY |
$152,552 |
$139,961 |
-8% |
Nebraska |
$159,428 |
$146,482 |
-8% |
Oregon |
$157,515 |
$164,152 |
4% |
mean |
-12% |
||
median |
-12% |
||
n_schools |
19 |
||
% of schools with decline |
95% |
||
% of schools with increase |
5% |
* The previous post and this post use the Social Security Administration’s Average Wage Index for Inflation adjustment. Dollar figures are shown in real 2022 dollars.
** The math is as follows: 100 * (1-0.24) = 76. But 76 * (1 + 0.31) =100.
*** Compare this to the 24 percent drop at the mean seen with only two additional years of data, from 2013 to 2022.
**** SALT reports summer stipends separately from base salary. I’ve added stipends back into total compensation for my calculations. SALT reports medians at each school and seniority level. Means in the sentence above refers to the mean across reporting schools.
https://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2023/10/double-digit-drop-in-real-law-professor-pay-confirmed-by-second-data-source-michael-simkovic.html