Salary Growth for Engineering Faculty

Reprinted from ASEE Connections newsletter:

by Rossen Tsanov

In this edition of Databyte for Connections, we are looking at the pace of salary growth for engineering faculty early in their career (at the Junior Lecturer and Assistant Professor levels). We used data from the annual ASEE’s Faculty Salary Survey, comparing disciplines’ salary median in the span of five years.

The engineering discipline that outpaced all others in terms of growth in compensation for entry level non-tenure track faculty between 2015 and 2019 was Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering with a 23% growth rate. The pay for Civil Engineering entry-level faculty was able to keep up with the salaries in Computer Science with both disciplines registering a 14% increase in salary for these faculty in the five year period.  Entry level non-tenure track faculty include full-time lecturers, instructors and teaching assistant professors with less than 5 years of service.

For tenure track assistant professors, the most noticeable increase between 2015 and 2019 was in Engineering Technology, where salaries grew by 15% in five years. Among engineering disciplines, Assistant Professors in Agricultural Engineering had the fastest growing wages for the period at a 13% rate, outpacing even Computer Science faculty whose salaries grew by 10% in five years, but still remain the highest paid engineering faculty discipline.