All faculty types suffered job losses during the 2020-21 academic year.
The reason is COVID-19 pandemic-related budget cuts, CUPA-HR research director Dr. Jacqueline Bichsel wrote in an email.
With a nearly 5% decline, adjunct faculty were worst off. According to a CUPA-HR press release, master’s, baccalaureate and associate’s institutions reduced adjunct workforces by more than 6%. Meanwhile, at associate’s institutions, tenure-track faculty had the largest percent decrease – -7.8%.
In terms of full-time faculty in specific departments, leisure and recreational activities and library science suffered the biggest job loss percentage – each had a more than 13% decline in full-time faculty, according to the release. As for sheer number, business, management and marketing and biological and biomedical sciences lost the most faculty, with a third to almost 50% of institutions reporting cuts in these departments.
When it comes to full-time faculty salaries, the overall median increase from 2019-20 to 2020-21 was 0.69%, marking the lowest increase since 2010, according to the report overview.
Despite the many changes wrought by the pandemic, the ratios of tenure-track, non-tenure-track and adjunct faculty are more or less the same from last year, according to the overview.
