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Chemistry professors

Official title Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1052)

Also called Chemistry postsec teacher, Chemistry faculty, Chemistry lecturer, Organic chemistry professor, Inorganic chemistry professor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 19,980 US chemistry professors, with median pay of $93,250 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 20,650, in May 2022, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 5,500 from 1950, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for chemistry professors: AI retrosynthesis platforms, 2018 to 2024.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.3% 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.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Chemistry professors: jobs and pay since 1950 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1052

Chicago

Future History. "Chemistry professors: jobs and pay since 1950." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1052.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1052, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Chemistry professors: jobs and pay since 1950}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1052}}, 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.

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1850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Professor of Chemistry / Lecturer in Chemistry (German laboratory model era)
Known then as Professor of Chemistry / Instructor in Chemistry (land-grant and liberal arts era)
Known then as Chemistry Professor / Chemistry Instructor (post-Sputnik NDEA expansion era)
Known then as Chemistry Faculty / Assistant or Associate Professor of Chemistry (tenure-track consolidation era)
Known then as Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1052)
Known today as Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1052)
Projected to still be called Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1052)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
20K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$93,250
Est.

≈ $90,859 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1847

Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School opens, offering the first US graduate-level chemistry instruction modeled on Justus von Liebig's Giessen laboratory. Yale's Sheffield Scientific School also opens the same year. These two institutions establish the template: chemistry faculty are people who run laboratories, train students at the bench, and produce original research -- not just lecturers. The Liebig model, in which students perform chemistry rather than watch it performed, remains the organizing principle of chemistry education through the present day.

Beat · 1862

President Lincoln signs the Morrill Land-Grant College Act on July 2, 1862, donating federal land to each state for the establishment of colleges focused on agriculture, mechanical arts, and military science. Because chemistry is fundamental to agriculture (soil science, fertilizers, plant nutrition) and the mechanic arts (metallurgy, industrial chemistry), the Morrill Act directly creates demand for chemistry faculty at dozens of new institutions. Land-grant chemistry departments at Michigan Agricultural College (now MSU), Iowa State, and Kansas State are among the earliest to hire dedicated chemistry faculty to serve this mandate.

Beat · 1876

Thirty-five chemists meet at the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York on April 6, 1876 to found the American Chemical Society. Harvey Washington Wiley (later famous for the Pure Food and Drug Act) is among the early presidents; his presidency more than doubles ACS membership. The ACS formalizes the professional identity of the postsecondary chemistry teacher: it creates publication venues (JACS from 1879), standards for chemistry degree programs (later formalized through the ACS Committee on Professional Training), and a community that distinguishes academic chemistry from the work of industrial and practical chemists.

Beat · 1957

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first manmade orbital satellite. American public anxiety about Soviet technological superiority redirects federal policy toward science education. Congress passes the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) within a year, committing $1 billion to science, mathematics, and language education. The National Science Foundation rewrites chemistry curricula from high school through graduate school and funds hundreds of summer institutes in which university chemistry professors train secondary school teachers. The post-Sputnik era is the most significant federal investment in chemistry education infrastructure in US history and is the proximate cause of the near-doubling of chemistry faculty positions from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s.

Beat · 1972

The AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey documents the beginning of an eight-year period (1972-73 through 1980-81) during which average faculty salary increases consistently fall behind the consumer price index -- a real-wage decline for the academic profession. Chemistry faculty were somewhat insulated by higher STEM market demand, but the broader academic salary squeeze of the 1970s coincides with the first wave of adjunctification: institutions increasingly hire part-time instructors to teach introductory chemistry sections rather than adding tenure-track lines. This structural shift -- which would accelerate in the 1980s-2000s -- means that the total count of "chemistry teachers, postsecondary" increasingly includes a growing share of non-tenure-track instructors with significantly lower wages and job security than the tenure-track professoriate.

Beat · 2024

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded jointly to David Baker for computational protein design and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for AlphaFold protein structure prediction. The Nobel recognition accelerates integration of computational tools into biochemistry and structural chemistry curricula at US universities. A documented undergraduate biochemistry module using AlphaFold2 for protein structure prediction, reported in a 2024 PMC study covering 64 students across two 3-hour sessions, illustrates how quickly Nobel-recognized tools enter the chemistry teaching laboratory.

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 chemistry 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
+2.3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1052 (Chemistry teachers, postsecondary): 24.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 25.4 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.6 thousand (+2.3%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. 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)
40.2%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1052.00 Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.402, 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) 0.235 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.569; GPT-4-rated β 0.431. 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 chemistry 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 undergraduate chemistry problem sets, lab reports, and exams: using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping for multiple-choice and short-answer chemistry assignments, then applying expert chemical judgment to evaluate mechanism quality, spectral interpretation reasoning, and synthetic planning arguments that automated scoring cannot assess reliably.

Grade and provide feedback on undergraduate chemistry problem sets, lab reports, and exams: using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping for multiple-choice and short-answer chemistry assignments, then applying expert chemical judgment to evaluate mechanism quality, spectral interpretation reasoning, and synthetic planning arguments that automated scoring cannot assess reliably.[6],[9]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Deploy Gradescope for all chemistry assessments that have deterministic answers: mechanism identification, stoichiometric calculations, spectral peak matching. The J. Chem. Ed. (2025) study documents significant grading-efficiency gains specifically in undergraduate chemistry courses using Gradescope's AI-assisted grouping. Reserve expert effort for the qualitatively hard judgment: is this student's arrow-pushing mechanistically valid even if the product is wrong? Is this NMR interpretation reasoning consistent with the data?

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare and revise course materials (syllabi, lecture slides, lab procedures, and problem sets) using AI tools (ChatGPT Edu, NotebookLM) to generate first-draft organic chemistry slide decks, draft safety protocol documents, and synthesize literature on reaction mechanisms, then editing with chemical expertise to ensure accuracy, appropriate hazard communication, and alignment with current synthetic methodology.

Prepare and revise course materials (syllabi, lecture slides, lab procedures, and problem sets) using AI tools (ChatGPT Edu, NotebookLM) to generate first-draft organic chemistry slide decks, draft safety protocol documents, and synthesize literature on reaction mechanisms, then editing with chemical expertise to ensure accuracy, appropriate hazard communication, and alignment with current synthetic methodology.[5],[1]

Where your edge is

Use ChatGPT Edu to generate a first-draft 50-slide organic chemistry lecture on carbonyl chemistry or a lab handout for a Grignard synthesis: it will produce reasonable structure and standard content. Then invest your expert effort in verifying mechanistic accuracy (AI frequently misdraws arrow-pushing mechanisms or invents reaction conditions), adding current literature examples, and incorporating safety annotations that comply with your institution's Chemical Hygiene Plan. The J. Chem. Ed. (2025) faculty consensus: AI accelerates the scaffolding phase significantly but chemical accuracy review by domain expert remains essential.

AI is sitting alongside you hereHold office hours and respond to student questions on reaction mechanisms, spectral interpretation, and synthesis planning: using virtual lab platforms (Labster) to handle asynchronous practice of standard experiments outside class, and triaging which conceptual questions AI tutors (ChatGPT, Khanmigo) can adequately address versus which require expert human engagement with a student's specific chemical misconception.

Hold office hours and respond to student questions on reaction mechanisms, spectral interpretation, and synthesis planning: using virtual lab platforms (Labster) to handle asynchronous practice of standard experiments outside class, and triaging which conceptual questions AI tutors (ChatGPT, Khanmigo) can adequately address versus which require expert human engagement with a student's specific chemical misconception.[15],[8]

Where your edge is

Deploy Labster virtual labs for pre-lab preparation on standard experiments (titration, distillation, organic synthesis): students who arrive at the physical lab having completed the virtual version make fewer mistakes and need less fundamental supervision, freeing your time for the genuine teaching moments. Direct ChatGPT Edu to handle the 10pm mechanism questions for straightforward nucleophilic substitution or elimination reactions; reserve your office-hour engagement for the student who has genuinely tried and still cannot reconcile their NMR spectrum with their proposed product structure. Those are the highest-leverage teaching interactions and the ones AI cannot reliably navigate.

Where chemistry 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

Chemistry faculty frequently move into department chair, associate dean of science, or dean of college roles, particularly those who have led curriculum redesign efforts, managed laboratory safety programs, chaired ACS accreditation reviews (for chemistry BS programs requiring ACS approval), or served on university AI governance committees. Chemistry departments are under significant pressure to modernize computational and AI content, revise laboratory safety infrastructure, and respond to AI-generation of student work in assessments, creating demand for administrators with both technical credibility and governance experience. The CRI increase reflects that postsecondary education administration is growing (+7% BLS 2024-2034) and moderately AI-augmented for data analytics and reporting tasks.

What you'd add
  • · ACS Committee on Professional Training (CPT) accreditation self-study and continuous improvement documentation for approved chemistry programs
  • · Higher education budget management: faculty line planning, laboratory equipment capital requests, and research overhead recovery negotiations
  • · Faculty performance review, promotion/tenure facilitation, and hiring committee leadership for chemistry searches
  • · Lab safety program administration: Chemical Hygiene Officer responsibilities, OSHA compliance, EPA waste reporting, and facilities management
  • · University AI governance: developing student AI-use policy for chemistry courses, evaluating AI tools for institutional deployment, faculty development planning
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of chemistry professors changed since 1847?

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

  • Liebig glass-bench laboratory (teaching laboratory as a pedagogical technology)

    The Liebig laboratory model -- a room fitted with individual workbenches, glassware, water supply, drainage, and fume management -- was itself the defining technology of the postsecondary chemistry teacher's role. Before Liebig, chemistry instruction was delivered by lecture and demonstration only; the professor showed the student how reactions behaved. After Liebig, the student performed the reactions under faculty supervision. This created the teaching laboratory as an infrastructure requirement that has defined the chemistry faculty position ever since: unlike humanities or social science professors, chemistry faculty cannot teach without a physical laboratory, and the supervision of that laboratory is the most legally non-delegable part of their job. The Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard (1847) and the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale were the first US institutions to adopt this model.

  • UV/Vis spectrophotometer + analytical instrumentation (Beckman DU, 1941)

    The Beckman Model DU spectrophotometer, introduced in 1941, was the first instrument to move analytical chemistry from purely wet-bench methods toward instrumental analysis. By the 1950s, UV/Vis spectrophotometry was standard in undergraduate analytical chemistry courses, and its introduction into teaching laboratories changed both what chemistry faculty had to know and how they taught it. Faculty now had to teach instrument operation, calibration, and interpretation alongside traditional titration and gravimetric methods. The introduction of NMR spectroscopy into university teaching labs in the 1960s and mass spectrometry in the 1970s continued this pattern: each new instrument expanded the technical scope of what a chemistry teacher was responsible for demonstrating and supervising.

    Effect on the work

    Instrumentation did not reduce the number of chemistry faculty required; if anything, it increased demand because instrument maintenance and complex operation required expert supervision. The technical barrier to chemistry teaching rose with each instrument generation.

  • Post-Sputnik federal science funding (NDEA 1958, NSF curriculum overhaul)

    The Soviet launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957 triggered the most significant federal investment in chemistry education in US history. Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, allocating $1 billion for science, mathematics, and language education at all levels. The National Science Foundation funded the rewriting of chemistry curricula at universities and summer seminars in which university chemistry faculty trained high school teachers in new materials. In the decades after Sputnik, NSF spent $500 million on curricula and teacher development. This was not a technology in the conventional sense but it functioned as the enabling infrastructure for the major expansion of university chemistry faculty from the late 1950s through the 1970s: new positions were funded, new laboratory buildings constructed, and chemistry professors became federally sponsored public goods whose job was producing the scientists the Cold War required.

    Effect on the work

    University chemistry faculty positions roughly doubled from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. New PhD programs opened at regional universities and state colleges that had previously had only bachelor's-level chemistry programs, creating demand for research-active faculty at institutions that had previously employed only instructors.

  • Personal computer + computational chemistry software (MOPAC, Gaussian, HyperChem)

    The introduction of personal computers into chemistry teaching laboratories through the late 1970s and 1980s transformed how chemistry faculty taught molecular modeling, kinetics simulations, and data analysis. MOPAC (1983), Gaussian (1970, but widely available academically from the 1980s), and later HyperChem (1987) and Spartan brought computational chemistry from mainframe-only research tools into undergraduate teaching. Chemistry faculty now had to be fluent in computational methods alongside bench work: a faculty member teaching organic chemistry in 1995 was expected to demonstrate electron density surfaces and transition-state geometries using 3D molecular visualization that had not existed at all when they trained. This era also brought spreadsheet-based kinetics analysis (Excel replacing paper graph plotting in lab reports) and CAS SciFinder (1995) replacing manual Chemical Abstracts card searches for literature review.

  • Online learning platforms + course management systems (Blackboard 1997, Canvas 2011, Labster 2012)

    Course management systems -- Blackboard (adopted widely at universities from 1997), then Moodle (2002) and Canvas (2011) -- changed the administrative and content-delivery dimensions of chemistry teaching without changing the laboratory dimension. Faculty could now post syllabi, assignments, and lecture slides online; students could submit lab reports digitally. For large introductory chemistry courses (hundreds of students), the LMS became the primary communication channel. The more transformative innovation for chemistry specifically was Labster (founded 2012), which introduced virtual laboratory simulations for titration, distillation, organic synthesis, and spectroscopy -- extending chemistry experiments to online learners who could not access a physical lab and providing pre-lab preparation that reduced safety incidents in the physical laboratory.

  • AI retrosynthesis platforms (IBM RXN 2018, Reaxys Predictive Retrosynthesis)

    IBM launched IBM RXN for Chemistry in 2018 as a free cloud-based AI retrosynthesis platform: given a target molecule, the system proposes synthetic routes in seconds using deep learning trained on millions of published reactions. By 2022-2023 it was in active use in university chemistry courses as a pedagogical tool: faculty assigned students to critique AI-proposed routes, identifying chemically unsound step-2 byproducts, incompatible protecting groups, and unrealistic yield claims. Reaxys launched its AI-powered predictive retrosynthesis module and natural-language search (2025) extending this to 121 million chemistry documents. These tools restructured what chemistry faculty teach: the question shifted from "how do you design a synthesis?" to "how do you evaluate and improve a synthesis that AI has already proposed?"

  • Generative AI in chemistry education (ChatGPT, Gradescope AI, AlphaFold, Reaxys AI Search)

    The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 created an immediate crisis for chemistry assessment: take-home synthesis problems and mechanism assignments completable in minutes by AI became invalid as assessment instruments. The Journal of Chemical Education documented rapid faculty adoption of generative AI for course-material scaffolding, exam question generation, and grading acceleration (Gradescope's AI-assisted answer grouping specifically documented for undergraduate chemistry in 2025). The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizing AlphaFold and computational protein design accelerated integration of protein structure prediction into biochemistry curricula. FSU research (2024) showed statistical Rasch modeling could detect ChatGPT use on chemistry multiple-choice exams while standard AI-detection tools could not. Chemistry faculty are now navigating three simultaneous pressures: AI augments their content preparation and grading; AI threatens their assessment integrity; and AI tools (IBM RXN, Reaxys AI, AlphaFold) have become skills their students must master for industry employment.

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Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1847
Latest US employment19,980 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$93,250 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.3% 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
19505,500n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
197011,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
1975n/a$16,200Est., AAUP Researched contextReport
199019,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
2000n/a$54,000Est., AAUP Researched contextReport
200317,100$55,420BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200418,720$56,660BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200519,520$58,060BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200619,560$61,220BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200719,800$63,870BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200819,950$67,240BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200920,370$68,760BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201021,150$70,520BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201120,830$70,960BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201220,430$71,140BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201320,820$72,670BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201421,470$73,080BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201521,460$75,060BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201621,250$76,750BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201721,090$77,190BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201821,370$79,550BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201921,380$79,550BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202021,530$80,400BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202120,260$79,410BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202220,650$80,720BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202320,210$85,810BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202420,390$86,220BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202519,980$93,250BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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