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Sociology professors

Official title Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1067)

Also called Soc professor, Sociology postsec teacher, Sociology faculty, Sociology lecturer, Sociology instructor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 11,850 US sociology professors, with median pay of $84,290 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 17,430, in May 2010. 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 sociology professors: Computational social science tools + Zoom pedagogy, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.2% 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 .

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APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Sociology professors: jobs and pay since 1920 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1067

Chicago

Future History. "Sociology 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/25-1067.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1067, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Sociology professors: jobs and pay since 1920}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1067}}, 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 Professor of Sociology (nascent discipline, single-department era)
Known then as Sociologist / Sociology Professor (professionalized, expanding field)
Known then as Sociology Faculty / Sociology Instructor (mass higher-education era)
Known then as Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1067)
Known today as Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1067)
Projected to still be called Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1067)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
12K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$84,290
Est.

≈ $82,129 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1892

Albion Woodbury Small founds the first independent sociology department in the United States at the University of Chicago. President William Rainey Harper had recruited Small from Colby College to lead the new department. Small will chair it for 30 years, found the American Journal of Sociology in 1895 (the discipline's first scholarly journal), co-author the field's first American textbook with George Vincent in 1894, and serve as founding president of the American Sociological Society in 1905. The first generation of Chicago sociology faculty, including W.I. Thomas, Robert Park, and Ernest Burgess, establishes urban ethnography as a primary method.

Beat · 1905

December 27, 1905: approximately 50 sociologists from 21 educational institutions gather at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to found the American Sociological Society (later renamed the American Sociological Association in 1959). Lester F. Ward is elected president; William G. Sumner first vice president; Franklin H. Giddings second vice president. Membership for the inaugural year is 115. The founding of a professional society marks sociology's transition from an ad-hoc academic interest into an organized discipline with shared standards, a publication venue, and a collective identity.

Beat · 1944

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) transforms American higher education and with it the demand for sociology faculty. By 1947, 49% of students enrolled in US colleges and universities are veterans; college enrollment swells 70% over prewar levels. Nearly 8 million veterans use GI Bill educational provisions by 1956. The resulting expansion of universities, particularly large state public universities, drives rapid hiring of new faculty across all disciplines. ASA membership, which had been approximately 1,500-2,000 before the war, begins a decades-long growth trajectory, reaching 3,522 by 1950.

Beat · 1968

SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is released at Stanford University by Norman Nie, Dale Bent, and Hadlai Hull, becoming the dominant statistical software for sociology research and graduate methods training. SPSS runs on IBM System/360 mainframes at universities and makes multivariate regression, factor analysis, and crosstab analysis accessible to sociologists without programming backgrounds. By the mid-1970s, SPSS proficiency is a standard expectation for sociology PhD graduates and is taught in methods courses across the country. The software will run without major disruption for nearly 60 years.

Beat · 1975

The academic job market for sociology PhDs collapses. The number of US doctorates awarded had tripled from approximately 10,000 in 1960 to nearly 30,000 by 1970, creating an oversupply that met declining new-faculty positions. The AAUP documents eight consecutive years (1972-1981) in which average faculty salary increases are below the inflation rate, representing a real-terms wage decline that the profession will not fully recover from. Sociology, as a humanities-adjacent social science field, is particularly hard hit: the 1970s job market crisis becomes a persistent structural condition, not a temporary recession, as institutions increasingly turn to part-time and non-tenure-track appointments rather than new tenure lines.

Beat · 1993

ATLAS.ti 1.0 is released by Scientific Software Development in Berlin, becoming the first widely adopted qualitative data analysis software for sociology faculty. The same year, NCES conducts the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF-93), the most comprehensive survey of US college instructors to date, finding that approximately 30% of all postsecondary instructors are part-time -- a shift from the predominantly full-time faculty model of the 1960s-70s. For sociology specifically, the adjunctification trend is acute: many of the new sociology courses demanded by the postwar enrollment boom had been staffed with part-timers and non-tenure-track lecturers, eroding the occupation's security and wage floor even as the overall faculty count held steady.

Beat · 2025

The American Sociological Association convenes a webinar titled "Challenges and Opportunities: Teaching Sociology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," signaling that the discipline has accepted AI tools as a permanent condition rather than a temporary disruption. Faculty panelists identify the core tension: generative AI can perform many of the preparatory and administrative tasks that consume sociology faculty time (syllabus drafting, quiz generation, literature synthesis, initial qualitative coding), but the irreducible core of sociology pedagogy -- facilitating the sociological imagination, moderating discussions of race and inequality with students holding opposing lived experiences, supervising IRB fieldwork, and mentoring dissertation research -- cannot be delegated to any AI system. The webinar marks a professional consensus point: sociology faculty who adopt AI tools become more productive; the discipline's irreducible human core remains intact.

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 sociology 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
+2.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1067 (Sociology teachers, postsecondary): 14.6 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 15.0 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.3 thousand (+2.2%). 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)
39.8%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1067.00 Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.398, 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) 0.205 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.591; GPT-4-rated β 0.432. 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 sociology professors

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereTeach audio/video interview transcription in research methods courses, integrating Sonix AI into the fieldwork workflow so students submit recordings for automated transcription (99%+ accuracy, FERPA-compliant, exports directly to NVivo and ATLAS.ti), then spend their time on analysis and interpretation rather than manual transcription, and critically evaluate where AI speaker diarization and accuracy falter in real fieldwork conditions.

Teach audio/video interview transcription in research methods courses, integrating Sonix AI into the fieldwork workflow so students submit recordings for automated transcription (99%+ accuracy, FERPA-compliant, exports directly to NVivo and ATLAS.ti), then spend their time on analysis and interpretation rather than manual transcription, and critically evaluate where AI speaker diarization and accuracy falter in real fieldwork conditions.[12],[1]

Where your edge is

Manual interview transcription, several hours of work per recording, has been the most universally resented task in sociology fieldwork training for decades. Sonix AI (SOC 2 Type II certified, FERPA-compliant, exports to NVivo, ATLAS.ti, and standard subtitle formats) reduces this to minutes per interview. Build Sonix into the research methods workflow as the default: students submit recordings, get transcripts back in minutes, and spend the recovered time on the sociologically valuable work of analysis and interpretation. Then build a critical evaluation exercise: compare Sonix output to a manual check of the same passage, where does speaker identification fail? Where does domain-specific vocabulary (names of community organizations, vernacular terms) get mangled? That critical evaluation exercise teaches both research rigor and AI literacy.

AI is sitting alongside you hereModerate online course discussion boards in large-enrollment sociology courses, replacing passive LMS discussion forums with Packback AI-moderated inquiry discussions that enforce curiosity standards and require students to pose open-ended sociological questions with citation-backed rationales, eliminating the low-effort one-paragraph response problem that plagues intro sociology online discussions.

Moderate online course discussion boards in large-enrollment sociology courses, replacing passive LMS discussion forums with Packback AI-moderated inquiry discussions that enforce curiosity standards and require students to pose open-ended sociological questions with citation-backed rationales, eliminating the low-effort one-paragraph response problem that plagues intro sociology online discussions.[13],[14]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Low-effort online discussion posts ("Great point! I agree because...") are endemic to large-enrollment intro sociology courses and waste faculty grading time proportionally. Packback's AI moderation enforces a Curiosity Score that requires students to pose genuine questions, cite sources, and engage substantively, documented to produce 2x the citation rate and longer responses compared to standard LMS discussion boards. The AI coaching provides immediate feedback to students before submission, reducing the grading burden on faculty while raising the intellectual floor of the discussion. Reserve faculty engagement for the highest-curiosity posts that surface genuine sociological puzzles: those are the discussions that move the needle on student intellectual development and that AI cannot sustain through to resolution.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign, administer, and evaluate examinations, essays, and writing assignments in sociology courses: using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping to batch short-answer quiz responses for large-enrollment intro sociology courses, while reserving faculty judgment for essay assessments that require evaluating sociological reasoning, theoretical application, and empirical argumentation that AI cannot score reliably.

Design, administer, and evaluate examinations, essays, and writing assignments in sociology courses: using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping to batch short-answer quiz responses for large-enrollment intro sociology courses, while reserving faculty judgment for essay assessments that require evaluating sociological reasoning, theoretical application, and empirical argumentation that AI cannot score reliably.[15],[6]

Where your edge is

Deploy Gradescope for all sociology assessments with deterministic or near-deterministic answers, matching sociological theorists to their concepts, identifying research methods, labeling social structures from a vignette. Gradescope's AI-assisted grouping clusters similar student responses for batch grading, recovering significant time in courses with more than a hundred students. Use Turnitin's AI detection as a flag for closer scrutiny of essay submissions, not as standalone evidence of misconduct. For essay redesign, the Judson (2025) Teaching Sociology study documents three semesters of collaborative AI policy co-design in sociology courses: assignments requiring students to critique an AI-generated sociological analysis of a specific community or event, rather than produce analysis from scratch, are more learning-valid and substantially harder to outsource than traditional take-home essays.

Where sociology 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

Sociology faculty frequently move into department chair, associate dean for diversity and inclusion, dean of social sciences, or director of academic programs roles, particularly those who have led curriculum redesign for AI integration, chaired departmental DEI initiatives, managed accreditation reviews (HLC, SACSCOC), or served on institutional AI governance and academic integrity task forces. Sociology's disciplinary expertise in organizational dynamics, institutional racism, stratification, and social change is directly useful in higher education administrative contexts where faculty governance, equitable hiring, and student success policy are the primary concerns. The CRI increase reflects that postsecondary education administration is growing (+7% BLS 2024-2034) and that sociology-trained administrators bring a disciplinary framework for equity and organizational analysis that is increasingly valued in academic leadership hiring.

What you'd add
  • · HLC/SACSCOC/WASC accreditation self-study preparation, assurance argument writing, and continuous improvement documentation
  • · Higher education budget management: faculty line planning, course scheduling optimization, and research center budget oversight
  • · Faculty development programming: designing AI literacy workshops for sociology and social science faculty, facilitating assessment redesign for AI-resilient pedagogy
  • · University AI governance: developing departmental student AI-use policy frameworks, evaluating AI tools for institutional teaching and research deployment, coordinating academic integrity response protocols
  • · Enrollment management and program assessment: using institutional data dashboards to monitor sociology major enrollment trends, student success metrics, and program health indicators
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of sociology professors changed since 1892?

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

  • Chalkboard lecture + library card catalog + handwritten field notes

    The founding generation of sociology faculty had no specialized tools beyond the university library, the printed monograph, and handwritten field notes. Albion Small and the Chicago School faculty (Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, W.I. Thomas) conducted urban ethnography on foot, carried notebooks into Chicago neighborhoods, and analyzed their findings through sustained reading and argumentation. The card catalog was the only information retrieval technology; seminar discussion was the only pedagogical technology. Teaching sociology in 1892-1940 meant the professor's embodied knowledge and rhetorical skill were literally the entire curriculum delivery mechanism.

  • IBM punch-card tabulation + survey research methods

    The 1940s-1950s saw sociology acquire its first quantitative tools. The Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research (Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton) pioneered survey research and IBM punch-card tabulation to analyze large datasets of public opinion and social behavior. The tabulating machine allowed sociologists to cross-tabulate hundreds of survey responses in hours rather than weeks. For faculty, this meant two things: the emergence of a research methodology (survey-based, quantitatively analyzed) that could be taught as a rigorous curriculum, and the transformation of sociology graduate training from primarily theoretical seminars to methods training that included statistical analysis.

    Effect on the work

    Punch-card tabulation brought postsecondary sociology into alignment with a new "scientific" standard for social research. Departments that adopted quantitative methods attracted federal funding (NSF social science grants began in the 1950s) and prestige; departments that remained purely qualitative faced pressure to modernize. This bifurcation between quantitative and qualitative wings of sociology persists to the present.

  • SPSS mainframe statistical software (1968) + mimeograph / photocopier

    SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) launched in 1968 at Stanford and became the dominant tool for sociology faculty conducting quantitative research and teaching statistics. Before SPSS, running a multivariate regression required punching individual data cards and submitting a batch job to the university mainframe. SPSS made regression, crosstab, and factor analysis accessible to sociologists who were not mathematicians. By the mid-1970s, SPSS was a required tool in most sociology PhD programs and was taught in graduate methods courses. The photocopier (Xerox 914, 1959; widely deployed in universities by the late 1960s) transformed how syllabi and readings were distributed, allowing faculty to assemble course packets from journal articles rather than relying on a single assigned textbook.

    Effect on the work

    SPSS accelerated the quantitative research output of sociology departments and established a clear expectation that sociology PhD students would graduate with statistical competency. It also widened the gap between quantitative and qualitative methodological wings: faculty who embraced SPSS gained a competitive advantage in grant applications and journal publishing, while those focused on ethnography or historical methods faced pressure to demonstrate methodological rigor in different ways.

  • Personal computer + early qualitative software (HyperRESEARCH 1991, ATLAS.ti 1993)

    The IBM PC (1981) and Apple Macintosh (1984) moved computing from the shared mainframe to the faculty office desk. By the late 1980s, sociology faculty were word-processing manuscripts, running SPSS on departmental PC labs, and conducting literature searches via early CD-ROM databases (Sociological Abstracts on CD-ROM, EBSCO). The arrival of dedicated qualitative analysis software, HyperRESEARCH (1991, Researchware) and ATLAS.ti (1993, Scientific Software Development, Berlin), gave qualitative researchers a tool parallel to what SPSS had provided quantitative researchers: a structured environment for managing, coding, and analyzing large bodies of interview transcripts and field notes. For sociology faculty teaching qualitative methods, ATLAS.ti transformed what could be assigned: a graduate seminar could now code many interview transcripts collaboratively in a shared project, a task previously impossible with paper index cards.

  • Internet + LMS (Blackboard 1997, Moodle 2002) + digital journal access

    The web transformed how sociology faculty prepared courses, distributed readings, and communicated with students. JSTOR (launched 1995, social sciences added 1997) and sociological abstracts databases gave faculty and students access to the full archive of the sociological literature from a desktop browser. Learning management systems: Blackboard (1997) and open-source Moodle (2002) replaced paper syllabi with online course hubs, enabled online discussion forums, and changed how assignments were submitted and returned. For sociology specifically, the internet enabled new research methods: online survey platforms (SurveyMonkey 1999, Qualtrics 2002) allowed faculty to recruit nationally representative samples rather than relying on convenience samples, while digital ethnography emerged as studying social behavior on forums, early social networks, and comment threads became a legitimate research method.

  • Computational social science tools (R, Python, Twitter API, NLP) + Zoom pedagogy

    The 2010s saw computational text analysis, network analysis, and machine learning move from computer science into mainstream sociology research. The availability of large social media datasets (Twitter Academic API, Facebook data partnerships), administrative records (census microdata via IPUMS, hospitalization records, tax records), and accessible R and Python libraries (tidytext, stm for topic modeling, igraph for network analysis) created a new subspecialty of computational sociology with dedicated courses in PhD programs. COVID-19 (2020) forced the entire discipline onto Zoom, accelerating adoption of hybrid pedagogy tools (polling software, breakout rooms, Slack for office hours) and creating demand for recorded lecture archives. Sociology departments that had resisted online education found themselves running fully remote courses with little infrastructure and compressed timelines.

    Effect on the work

    Computational methods created a skills stratification within sociology faculty: those who learned R or Python could analyze datasets of millions of records; those who did not found their research programs increasingly marginal in grant competitions and top-journal acceptance. Community colleges and teaching-focused institutions were largely unaffected by this shift but felt the COVID-forced online transition acutely.

  • Generative AI tools (ATLAS.ti AI Coding, MAXQDA AI Assist, ChatGPT Edu, Sonix, Packback)

    Starting in 2023, AI tools began touching nearly every day-to-day task of sociology faculty: large language models can draft lecture outlines, write quiz questions on Durkheim, and generate first-pass qualitative code structures across interview transcripts. ATLAS.ti's Intentional AI Coding and MAXQDA AI Assist automated what had been the most labor-intensive task in teaching qualitative methods: initial coding of interview transcripts. Sonix AI transcription reduced the manual interview-transcription burden (previously several hours per recording) to minutes. The Federal Reserve's February 2026 analysis of educational exposure to generative AI placed social sciences among the most language-model-exposed academic disciplines, citing the text-heavy, interpretive nature of the work. The discipline's response, documented in the ASA's 2025 webinar and the Teaching Sociology journal, has been to reframe AI tools as objects of sociological analysis rather than labor-saving shortcuts: assigning students to critique AI-generated sociological analysis became a richer learning exercise than traditional take-home essays, and teaching AI literacy became a new curricular responsibility of sociology faculty.

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Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1892
Latest US employment11,850 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$84,290 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19201,500n/aEst., American Sociological Association Researched contextReport
19504,200n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
197014,000$12,000Est., American Sociological Association (employment) Researched contextEst., AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey (pay) Researched contextReport
199016,200$38,000Est., NCES (employment) Researched contextEst., American Historical Association (pay) Researched contextReport
200313,990$52,770BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200414,220$54,860BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200514,980$54,320BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200616,110$56,620BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200716,130$58,160BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200816,440$61,280BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200916,380$64,430BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201017,430$64,810BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201117,250$66,250BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201216,880$66,150BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201317,200$67,940BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201416,900$67,880BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201516,160$69,230BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201614,580$71,840BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201713,630$73,080BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201813,870$74,140BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201913,850$75,290BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202013,420$75,610BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202112,550$77,980BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202212,030$78,970BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202312,870$82,670BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202412,380$82,540BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202511,850$84,290BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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