LAO Report: Trends in Higher Education Faculty and Staff
California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office released a report on December 4th, 2024, titled “Trends in Higher Education Faculty and Staff.” Here are a few of the more interesting data points:
The number of faculty has gone up over all, but the number of tenured or tenure track faculty has actually gone down.
And despite this uptick in total faculty, student enrollment has grown faster. So the student to faculty ratio has gotten worse: now over 20 students for each faculty member. By comparison, non-profit private institutions in California average 10 students per faculty member (source: AICCU).
Faculty are a small share of the workforce at UC.
The LAO report also has a graph comparing faculty pay in California with faculty pay nationwide. However, that chart does not appear to have made any adjustments for local cost of living, resulting in data that is difficult to parse — just as displaying cost data over a long time series without compensating for inflation results in a confusing display.