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Business professors

Official title Business Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1011)

Also called MBA professor, Business school faculty, Management professor, Marketing professor, Finance professor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 82,150 US business professors, with median pay of $99,080 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 85,220, in May 2013, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 1,500 from 1920, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for business professors: Learning Management Systems and online delivery, 1998 to 2015.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.9% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Business professors: jobs and pay since 1920 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1011

Chicago

Future History. "Business professors: jobs and pay since 1920." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Business professors: jobs and pay since 1920}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Instructor in Commerce / Instructor in Finance (early collegiate business era)
Known then as Business School Instructor / Professor of Commerce (practitioner-instructor era)
Known then as Professor of Business Administration / Associate / Assistant Professor (research-professionalization era)
Known then as Business School Professor / MBA Faculty (MBA-boom era)
Known then as Business Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1011)
Known today as Business Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1011)
Projected to still be called Business Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1011)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
82K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$99,080
Est.

≈ $96,540 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1881

Joseph Wharton donates $100,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to establish the Wharton School of Finance and Economy, the world's first collegiate business school. The founding curriculum covers accounting, mercantile law, and the economic resources of the United States. The first class enrolls thirteen students, taught by a small faculty drawn largely from the commercial and legal professions. Wharton's founding motivation is explicit: American colleges produce graduates who cannot read a balance sheet or manage a commercial enterprise.

Beat · 1908

Harvard University Graduate School of Administration (later Harvard Business School) opens with a faculty of 15 and a class of 80 students, offering the first MBA degree program. The first dean is historian Edwin Francis Gay. Initial curriculum covers accounting, commercial contracts, and economic resources. Harvard's program would become the global template for MBA education, and its 1920s development of the case study method would reshape how business professors teach worldwide.

Beat · 1916

The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is founded by 17 universities, including Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Berkeley, and Northwestern. Its first accreditations are granted in 1919. The AACSB becomes the dominant accrediting body for business schools, eventually establishing standards that drive faculty hiring requirements, doctoral program design, and research expectations across the field. By 2025, AACSB accredits over 1,055 institutions in 69 countries, covering fewer than 6% of all business programs.

Beat · 1959

The Ford Foundation publishes the Gordon-Howell Report, coauthored by Robert Aaron Gordon of UC Berkeley and James E. Howell of Stanford, which delivers a damning verdict on American business education: academic standards are too low, faculty too often lack doctoral credentials, and curricula are too narrowly vocational. The Ford Foundation backs the report with major grants to reform business school faculties. The report launches a two-decade transformation of the business professor from practitioner-instructor to research-active scholar.

Beat · 1980

Business overtakes education as the most popular undergraduate major in the United States. The 1980-81 academic year produces 200,521 bachelor's degrees in business (NCES), up from 115,396 in 1970-71. MBA programs expand rapidly through the 1980s, with elite MBA credentials commanding significant salary premiums. The decade also sees business faculty salaries diverge upward from the all-faculty median, driven by competition from investment banking, consulting, and corporate finance for PhD graduates in finance and economics.

Beat · 2001

AACSB International formally adopts "AACSB International" as its name, reflecting its shift from a US-only to a global accrediting body after its first non-North-American accreditation (University of Alberta, 1968) and first European accreditation (ESSEC France, 1997). By 2001, AACSB accreditation is widely sought internationally, and American business faculty increasingly teach in global programs, executive education, and cross-border partnership programs.

Beat · 2022

Business remains the most commonly conferred bachelor's degree field in the United States: 375,418 business bachelor's degrees in 2021-22 (NCES), up from 249,165 in 1990-91. The growth in business degree conferrals has substantially outpaced faculty hiring growth, contributing to increased class sizes, higher adjunct use, and the expansion of online instruction. Graduate business enrollment faces a different trend: applications to full-time MBA programs have declined at many schools, while specialized master's programs (MS in Finance, MS in Data Analytics, MS in Marketing) have grown, reshaping the demand mix for business faculty expertise.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace business professors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+5.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1011 (Business teachers, postsecondary): 103.6 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 109.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +6.1 thousand (+5.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
42%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1011.00 Business Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.42, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.182 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.659; GPT-4-rated β 0.489. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for business professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGrade and provide feedback on student problem sets, case write-ups, and exams: using AI-assisted grading tools (Gradescope answer grouping, AI rubric matching) for quantitative assignments in accounting, finance, and operations courses, then applying professional judgment to the qualitative reasoning and argument quality that AI scoring cannot reliably evaluate.

Grade and provide feedback on student problem sets, case write-ups, and exams: using AI-assisted grading tools (Gradescope answer grouping, AI rubric matching) for quantitative assignments in accounting, finance, and operations courses, then applying professional judgment to the qualitative reasoning and argument quality that AI scoring cannot reliably evaluate.[6],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Adopt Gradescope AI-assisted grouping for quantitative problem sets, documented time reductions for cohorts apply directly to accounting or finance courses. Reinvest saved time into richer commentary on students' analytical reasoning quality, which is both where MBA students learn most and where AI cannot reliably assess. Use Turnitin AI detection as a flag for deeper review only, not as standalone evidence.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign, update, and deliver course syllabi, assignments, and instructional materials for business courses: using AI tools (ChatGPT Edu, NotebookLM) to draft first-version slides, case discussion guides, and assessment rubrics, then editing with domain expertise to ensure relevance to current industry practice and alignment with program learning objectives.

Design, update, and deliver course syllabi, assignments, and instructional materials for business courses: using AI tools (ChatGPT Edu, NotebookLM) to draft first-version slides, case discussion guides, and assessment rubrics, then editing with domain expertise to ensure relevance to current industry practice and alignment with program learning objectives.[4],[1]

Where your edge is

Use ChatGPT Edu to generate an initial 60-slide lecture deck or a case discussion guide, then spend your effort sharpening it with current industry examples and your own professional experience: this is where your credibility as a former practitioner or active researcher multiplies AI output. The Gies Business "build to learn" AI model (AACSB May 2026) confirms faculty who integrate AI into prep workflows produce richer course materials in less time.

AI is sitting alongside you hereStay current with developments in business disciplines and AI's impact on industry, reading management journals, trade press (Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly), monitoring AI tools disrupting the sectors you teach (finance, marketing, operations), and translating that intelligence into updated course materials and relevant examples for students entering AI-transformed careers.

Stay current with developments in business disciplines and AI's impact on industry, reading management journals, trade press (Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly), monitoring AI tools disrupting the sectors you teach (finance, marketing, operations), and translating that intelligence into updated course materials and relevant examples for students entering AI-transformed careers.[1],[4]

Where your edge is

Use NotebookLM to upload and synthesize a month of key trade publications and research preprints: it can map connections across many documents in minutes, giving you a richer literature map than manual reading alone. However, the judgment call of "what is actually important for my students to know about how AI is reshaping their future industry" requires your professional expertise and currency. Treating AI as a research accelerator, not a content authority, is the sustainable posture.

Where business professors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Education Administrators, Postsecondary

Business faculty frequently move into department chair, associate dean of business, or dean roles, particularly those who have demonstrated leadership in curriculum redesign, accreditation, and strategic planning. The transition is natural for faculty who enjoy committee work and institutional governance, and business schools urgently need administrators who can articulate AI's implications for management education to boards, accreditors, and external stakeholders. The AACSB AI accreditation framework (2025) has created demand for administrators with both business domain depth and AI policy fluency.

What you'd add
  • · Higher education budget management and resource allocation across faculty lines and program investments
  • · AACSB accreditation self-study coordination and continuous improvement documentation
  • · Faculty performance review, promotion/tenure process facilitation, and hiring committee leadership
  • · Strategic enrollment management: MBA program positioning, tuition benchmarking, and yield analysis
  • · University AI governance: policy development, vendor evaluation for institutional AI tools, and faculty development planning
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of business professors changed since 1881?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Chalk, ledger, and lecture, pre-textbook collegiate business era

    The first business professors at Wharton taught from practitioners' experience and rudimentary lecture notes. No dedicated business textbooks existed for collegiate-level instruction. Accounting was taught from hand-maintained ledgers; law and economics from primary legal and trade documents. The classroom was a lecture hall where an instructor with industry experience transmitted what they knew from practice. The pedagogical technology was essentially oral tradition formalized with a blackboard.

  • Case study method (Harvard Business School, 1924 formal adoption)

    Harvard Business School formally adopted the case method as its primary pedagogical approach in 1924, distributing written accounts of real business situations for students to analyze and discuss in class. The case method transformed the business professor's work: instead of transmitting knowledge through lecture, the professor's skill became facilitating a Socratic discussion among students who had read the same materials and arrived at different conclusions. Writing and distributing cases required new research infrastructure, and a cottage industry of case writers developed at HBS and later at IVEY, Darden, and other case-heavy programs. The method spread widely through the mid-20th century and remains the signature pedagogy at top MBA programs today.

    Effect on the work

    The case method reshaped the hiring profile for business faculty. Schools adopting it needed professors who could facilitate discussion under uncertainty rather than simply transmit information. This favored a different personality type than the lecture model and created the first real intellectual differentiation between business teaching and business doing.

  • PhD as the entry credential, the Gordon-Howell research-professionalization turn

    In 1959, the Ford Foundation published the Gordon-Howell Report, a sweeping critique of American business education that found academic standards too low, curricula too vocational, and faculty too often lacking doctoral credentials or scholarly rigor. The report recommended that business schools hire research-active PhDs, establish rigorous doctoral programs, and build ties to the underlying disciplines of economics, mathematics, psychology, and sociology. The Ford Foundation backed the recommendation with millions of dollars in grants to reform business school faculties. The effect was decisive: over the following two decades, the practitioner-instructor model gave way to the research-professor model, and a PhD in economics, finance, or a related discipline became the de facto entry credential for tenure-track business school positions.

    Effect on the work

    The Gordon-Howell transition professionalized the business faculty market dramatically. Tenured positions at research universities became inaccessible without a doctoral degree and a publication record, creating a sharp labor market bifurcation between research faculty and practitioner instructors that persists today. The shift also created an oversupply risk for doctoral graduates that would surface in subsequent decades.

  • PC, spreadsheet software, and quantitative methods, the MBA boom computation era

    The personal computer arrived in business schools just as the MBA was becoming the most prestigious professional credential in the United States. VisiCalc (1979), Lotus 1-2-3 (1983), and Excel (1985) transformed the teaching of finance, accounting, and operations management: problem sets that had previously required hours of hand calculation could now be assigned with realistic numbers, and students could explore sensitivity analyses interactively. Business professors in quantitative fields became early and enthusiastic adopters of spreadsheet software, integrating it into coursework by the mid-1980s. Statistical packages (SPSS, SAS, and later Stata) became standard in doctoral programs and research. The PC also made desktop publishing of course materials and research manuscripts dramatically more efficient.

    Effect on the work

    The spreadsheet-and-PC era reinforced the demand for business faculty by expanding the richness of quantitative business education. MBA enrollment surged: the number of business bachelor's degrees grew from 200,521 (1980-81) to 249,165 (1990-91) (NCES). The boom drew industry practitioners into adjunct teaching on a large scale, creating the part-time faculty tier that would grow throughout the 1990s.

  • Learning Management Systems and online delivery (Blackboard 1998, WebCT, later Canvas)

    Blackboard launched in 1997-98 and became the dominant LMS in US higher education within a few years, giving business professors a centralized platform for posting syllabi, slides, assignments, and grades. The LMS shifted administrative interaction from in-person office hours and paper handouts to asynchronous digital channels. The bigger disruption came with online and for-profit degree programs: the University of Phoenix (founded 1976, rapid online expansion in the late 1990s) and later Coursera, edX, and other platforms created a large market for online business instruction that expanded the adjunct teaching workforce while putting downward pressure on instruction costs and, by implication, on the bargaining power of non-tenure-track business faculty.

    Effect on the work

    Contingent faculty in US higher education grew from roughly 47% of all instructors in 1987 to 68% in 2021 (AAUP). Business programs, which had always used industry practitioners as adjuncts, were among the heaviest users of the contingent model. The LMS made it operationally easier to manage large adjunct faculty populations across multiple course sections.

  • Generative AI in business education (ChatGPT Edu, Gradescope AI grading, NotebookLM)

    ChatGPT's public release in November 2022 arrived as a direct challenge to traditional business school assessment. Within weeks, faculty discovered that essays, case write-ups, and take-home exams that constituted the bulk of MBA assessment could be produced competently by a language model. The field's response, documented by AACSB in its May 2026 Insights report on new teaching methods, has been twofold: redesigning assessments toward in-class presentations, oral defenses, simulations, and live role plays that cannot be delegated to AI; and adopting AI tools as teaching aids. Gradescope's AI-assisted answer grouping reduces grading time for large-cohort quantitative courses per problem set. ChatGPT Edu was deployed system-wide at the California State University system in February 2025 (460,000 students, 63,000 faculty and staff across many campuses). NotebookLM allows faculty to synthesize a semester's reading list in minutes for lecture preparation.

    Effect on the work

    Generative AI is augmenting business faculty productivity significantly in preparation, grading, and research-synthesis tasks, but the core live-facilitation and mentoring functions that define high-quality business education remain human. The AACSB (May 2026) framing: AI can handle 75% of routine student questions via a course chatbot but cannot replicate the judgment, credibility, and contextual coaching of an experienced business professor in a live case discussion.

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Business Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1881
Latest US employment82,150 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$99,080 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+5.9% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19201,500n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
195012,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
197045,000$12,000Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics (employment) Researched contextEst., AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey (pay) Researched contextReport
199072,000$48,000Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics (employment) Researched contextEst., AAUP 2005-06 Report on the Economic… (pay) Researched contextReport
200082,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
200368,260$55,510BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200468,340$57,210BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200567,420$59,210BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200667,390$62,040BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200767,700$64,900BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200869,690$68,000BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200973,790$73,320BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201079,070$73,760BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201182,090$74,770BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201282,460$73,660BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201385,220$75,120BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201485,030$74,090BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201584,890$75,370BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201683,030$77,490BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201784,340$80,300BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201884,230$83,960BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201983,920$87,200BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202079,810$88,010BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202179,640$94,360BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202278,410$88,790BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202382,980$97,130BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202481,780$97,270BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202582,150$99,080BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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