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Recreation and fitness professors

Official title Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1193)

Also called Recreation studies professor, Kinesiology professor, Sport management professor, Fitness studies postsec instructor, Physical education professor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 12,630 US recreation and fitness professors, with median pay of $77,270 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 19,410, in May 2012. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 3,200 from 1920, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for recreation and fitness professors: Wearable athlete monitoring and video biomechanics platforms, 2010 to 2020.

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 .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Recreation and fitness professors: jobs and pay since 1920 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1193

Chicago

Future History. "Recreation and fitness 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/25-1193.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1193, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Recreation and fitness professors: jobs and pay since 1920}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1193}}, 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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187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Professor of Hygiene and Physical Education (medical-gymnasium era)
Known then as Physical Education Instructor / Director of Physical Training
Known then as Physical Education Professor / Recreation Studies Faculty
Known then as Physical Education and Recreation Faculty (post-Title IX expansion era)
Known then as Kinesiology / Exercise Science / Recreation Faculty (rebranding era)
Known then as Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1193)
Known today as Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1193)
Projected to still be called Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1193)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
13K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$77,270
Est.

≈ $75,289 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1861

Edward Hitchcock Jr. appointed to lead the first Department of Hygiene and Physical Education at Amherst College, establishing postsecondary physical education as an academic discipline. He served for 50 years and measured the physical dimensions of every incoming freshman for over two decades, building the largest anthropometric dataset in American history to that point.

Beat · 1881

Dudley Allen Sargent opened his Normal School of Physical Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts to train women as postsecondary physical education instructors, creating the first pipeline of college-credentialed women PE faculty in the United States. The school later became Sargent College, now part of Boston University.

Beat · 1885

The Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (AAPE, later AAUPE, eventually SHAPE America) was founded, giving the nascent postsecondary physical education profession its first national organization. The founding membership of 49 included both college physical directors and normal school instructors.

Beat · 1950

NIRSA (then the National Intramural Association) was founded at Dillard University by Dr. William Wasson with 22 colleagues from 11 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, creating the first national body for campus intramural and recreational sports programming. The organization admitted women in April 1971 and expanded to its current scope under the name National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association by 1975.

Beat · 1954

The American College of Sports Medicine was founded at the Hotel Statler in New York City on April 22, 1954 during the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER) meeting. Seven physical educators and three physicians were among its 11 founders, formalizing the alliance between exercise science and medicine that would define the research expectations placed on fitness studies faculty for the next seven decades.

Beat · 1972

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal financial assistance, directly reshaping physical education and recreation departments. Women who had been excluded from men's physical education programs or relegated to separate underfunded women's departments gained access to equal programming, faculty lines, and facilities. UW-Madison's men's and women's physical education departments merged in 1976, a pattern repeated across American universities through the 1970s.

Beat · 1990

The 1990s brought a wave of department renamings from Physical Education to Kinesiology, Exercise Science, or Human Performance at major universities. University of Michigan adopted Division of Kinesiology in 1990; UNC Greensboro became Exercise and Sport Science in 1989; Kansas State became Kinesiology in 1992; UW-Madison merged with Therapeutic Science to form the Department of Kinesiology in 1992. The rebranding helped departments argue for health-sciences resources and doctoral program recognition but also created a research-teaching split that affected 25-1193 faculty hired primarily for their applied instruction skills.

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 recreation and fitness 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 25-1193 (Recreation and fitness studies teachers, postsecondary): 15.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 15.6 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)
61.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1193.00 Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.616, 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) 0.372 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.86; GPT-4-rated β 0.558. 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 recreation and fitness professors

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereDevelop course syllabi, learning objectives, and curriculum maps for kinesiology, sport management, recreation administration, or physical education teacher education (PETE) programs: using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to draft first-version syllabi from a list of course topics and SHAPE America / NASPE competency standards, then editing for institutional policy compliance, current research alignment, and the applied experience structure that makes the program distinctive.

Develop course syllabi, learning objectives, and curriculum maps for kinesiology, sport management, recreation administration, or physical education teacher education (PETE) programs: using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to draft first-version syllabi from a list of course topics and SHAPE America / NASPE competency standards, then editing for institutional policy compliance, current research alignment, and the applied experience structure that makes the program distinctive.[7],[4]

Where your edge is

ChatGPT Edu can produce a complete syllabus draft for a Sport Science Foundations course in minutes from a prompt listing the SHAPE America PETE standards you want to address: a task that previously consumed a few hours. The human contribution is the applied experience design: specifying which lab sessions require the kinesiology assessment suite, which weeks tie to your department's Catapult data collection days, and how the course progression builds toward the capstone practicum competencies. Save the AI-generated first draft as the starting point; your domain expertise determines whether it reflects current ACSM guidelines and institutional context.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign, assign, and grade large-enrollment kinesiology or recreation studies course assessments: using Gradescope AI-assisted grading to score short-answer anatomy questions, exercise prescription labs, and program design rubrics at scale, then reviewing AI-flagged edge cases and providing personalized written feedback on the high-stakes submissions where nuanced professional judgment matters.

Design, assign, and grade large-enrollment kinesiology or recreation studies course assessments: using Gradescope AI-assisted grading to score short-answer anatomy questions, exercise prescription labs, and program design rubrics at scale, then reviewing AI-flagged edge cases and providing personalized written feedback on the high-stakes submissions where nuanced professional judgment matters.[8],[9]

Where your edge is

Gradescope reduces rubric-grading time by 60-80% for large kinesiology lecture sections: deploy it for exercise prescription labs (FITT-VP components, progressive overload sequencing) and anatomy identification tasks where answers fall into well-defined correct/partial/incorrect categories. Reserve your grading time for the integrative assignments that cannot be rubricized: critiques of client case scenarios, individualized exercise program designs for clients with chronic conditions, and reflective journals from therapeutic recreation practicum placements. Use Turnitin AI detection on all written assignments as a baseline integrity check.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTeach biomechanics and exercise technique using AI-powered video analysis, recording student movement (sprinting, Olympic lifting, gait patterns, swim stroke, throwing mechanics) with Dartfish or smartphone-based video, applying frame-by-frame angle measurement and phase tagging to deliver individualized feedback on joint angles, force production sequencing, and technique errors, replacing the prior manual VHS/stopwatch approach with automated quantitative overlays.

Teach biomechanics and exercise technique using AI-powered video analysis, recording student movement (sprinting, Olympic lifting, gait patterns, swim stroke, throwing mechanics) with Dartfish or smartphone-based video, applying frame-by-frame angle measurement and phase tagging to deliver individualized feedback on joint angles, force production sequencing, and technique errors, replacing the prior manual VHS/stopwatch approach with automated quantitative overlays.[10],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Adopt Dartfish as your standard biomechanics instruction platform: universities that have integrated video analysis into kinesiology lab sections report that students demonstrate significantly greater retention of movement-correction feedback when they can see annotated overlays of their own performance compared to verbal correction alone. The expert interpretive layer remains human: Dartfish measures angles and phases but cannot diagnose whether a valgus knee collapse in a squat reflects weak hip abductors, ankle dorsiflexion restriction, or a motor-learning gap, that differential is your clinical contribution. Dartfish Edu licenses are available for higher education programs.

Where recreation and fitness professors go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Training and Development Specialists

Recreation and fitness studies faculty with a background in corporate wellness, employee health programming, or sport management are a natural fit for corporate Training and Development Specialist roles focused on wellness, health coaching, and physical performance for employee populations. Corporate L&D teams at large employers, health systems, and military/government contractors actively seek candidates who can design evidence-based physical wellness programs, onboard fitness technology platforms (WHOOP corporate, Noom for Work), and facilitate leadership development workshops with a health-performance framing. The CRI is slightly higher because Training and Development Specialists have more administrative augmentation upside and are less exposed to the semester-calendar volatility of academic employment.

What you'd add
  • · Instructional design fundamentals: ADDIE model, Bloom's taxonomy applied to adult learning, e-learning module development in Articulate 360 or Lectora for scalable corporate wellness content delivery
  • · Corporate wellness program management: WELCOA (Wellness Council of America) program design framework; biometric screening program administration; HIPAA-compliant health data handling for employer wellness programs
  • · LMS administration in enterprise context: Workday Learning, Cornerstone OnDemand, or LinkedIn Learning admin-side module creation, completion tracking, and reporting for HR compliance purposes
  • · AI tools for L&D: ChatGPT Edu or Microsoft 365 Copilot for rapid course content drafting; Articulate AI for e-learning module scripting; analytics dashboards for measuring program engagement and health outcome ROI
  • · Business communication and ROI reporting: presenting wellness program outcomes in terms employers value (absenteeism reduction, workers' comp trends, productivity proxy metrics, healthcare cost per employee); Excel/Power BI for program analytics
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of recreation and fitness professors changed since 1861?

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

  • Anthropometric instruments and gymnasium apparatus (Hitchcock-Sargent era)

    The first postsecondary physical education faculty worked with the tools of Victorian exercise science: calipers and measuring tapes for anthropometric assessment, Swedish wall bars and horizontal ladders for strength training, and Dudley Sargent's custom-designed pulley weights and chest expanders that could be individually calibrated to a student's baseline strength. Edward Hitchcock at Amherst measured each freshman's bodily dimensions at arrival and again at graduation, believing the resulting data would prove that college physical education improved health outcomes. These measurements required the professor's direct physical presence and expert interpretation, establishing in-person faculty-student physical interaction as the defining feature of the role from its very first iteration.

  • Organized sport curriculum and physical fitness testing (AAUPE era)

    After World War I revealed alarming rates of physical deficiency among military draftees, physical education departments shifted from the Victorian gymnasium model toward organized sport instruction and measurable fitness outcomes. The American Physical Education Association standardized curricula and introduced written achievement tests alongside physical performance tests, moving the faculty role from gymnasium director toward academic instructor who also coached. The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, founded in 1926 under biochemist David Bruce Dill, was the first university research center dedicated to exercise physiology, training a generation of physical education faculty who brought laboratory methods, oxygen consumption measurement, and physiological theory into undergraduate instruction.

  • Exercise physiology laboratory equipment (ACSM era: metabolic carts, ECG treadmill, ergometers)

    The founding of the American College of Sports Medicine in 1954 at the AAHPER meeting in New York formalized the alliance between exercise science and medicine that would define postsecondary fitness faculty for decades. ACSM's early members used metabolic carts, electrocardiographs, motorized treadmills, and cycle ergometers to conduct graded exercise tests, establishing the scientific credibility of exercise physiology as a research discipline. For postsecondary faculty, this meant that a credentialed recreation or fitness teacher was increasingly expected to operate laboratory equipment, interpret clinical-grade data, and publish in peer-reviewed journals alongside their teaching duties. The research-active faculty model spread from R1 universities to regional state schools by the 1970s, raising the terminal-degree expectation from master's to doctorate for tenure-track lines.

  • Computerized fitness assessment and sport biomechanics film (pre-digital video era)

    The 1970s and 1980s brought microcomputer-based fitness assessment systems to physical education labs, with VO2-max calculation software replacing manual graph interpolation and computerized body composition analysis (hydrostatic weighing connected to calculators) replacing hand-computed Siri equations. In biomechanics, 16mm film cameras gave way to VHS video in the late 1970s, allowing faculty to record and replay student movement at the cost of a consumer camcorder rather than a film processing lab. NIRSA's expansion into professionally managed recreation centers (the first student-fee-funded modern recreational sports facility era began in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s) created a distinct recreation administration faculty track alongside the kinesiology research track, with its own professional standards for programming, facility management, and inclusive recreation.

  • Digital video analysis and computerized metabolic testing (kinesiology rebranding era)

    The wave of physical education department renamings to Kinesiology, Exercise Science, or Human Performance between 1989 and 1995 (Michigan 1990, UNC Greensboro 1989, Kansas State 1992, UW-Madison 1992) reflected both the discipline's genuine scientific maturation and a strategic move to escape budget-cutting: "Kinesiology" sounded like science, not gym class. Faculty in newly renamed departments adopted digital video analysis tools (early Dartfish precursors), dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) for body composition, and metabolic carts with automated breath-by-breath analysis to replace the Douglas bag-and-Scholander method. The 2000 SOC revision recognized 25-1193 as a distinct occupational code for the first time, providing a clean data series from that point forward. Therapeutic recreation, meanwhile, professionalized through the ATRA certification system (founded 1990), creating a credentialing pathway that gave therapeutic recreation faculty a professional standard to anchor curriculum around.

  • Wearable athlete monitoring and video biomechanics platforms (Dartfish, Catapult, Polar)

    The 2010s brought commercial-grade tools into university recreation and fitness classrooms at price points feasible for department budgets. Dartfish video analysis software, originally developed for elite sport coaching, entered university kinesiology programs for biomechanics labs. Catapult Sports GPS vests, deployed at over 2,000 professional and collegiate programs globally, became teaching tools for sport science faculty who used real athlete load data to teach periodization and acute-to-chronic workload modeling. Polar Team Pro enabled group exercise classes to display live heart rate data for all participants on a single dashboard, turning the physiology lecture into a real-time demonstration. For faculty, these tools enriched laboratory instruction while simultaneously raising the technical fluency expected of graduates: employers in athletic training, corporate wellness, and professional sport organizations expected new hires to interpret wearable data natively.

    Effect on the work

    Wearable tools augmented faculty effectiveness rather than reducing headcount, consistent with BLS projected growth of approximately 2% for the occupation through 2034. The tools made richer, more evidence-based instruction possible without eliminating the faculty-presence requirement for lab supervision and practicum oversight.

  • AI-assisted grading, syllabus generation, and sport science analytics (ChatGPT Edu, Gradescope, WHOOP Coach)

    The post-2020 era brought two distinct AI tool categories into the recreation and fitness faculty workflow. Administrative AI tools -- ChatGPT Edu for syllabus and rubric drafting, Gradescope for AI-assisted grading of large kinesiology lecture sections, Canvas AI for quiz generation from uploaded lecture slides -- reduced time on preparation and grading by 60-80% for standardized assessments, freeing faculty hours for applied instruction. Sport science AI tools -- WHOOP Coach (GPT-4-powered biometric Q&A), Catapult AI load planning dashboards, and AI-assisted video phase detection in Dartfish 11 -- enriched the data students could interrogate in lab. The net effect for the faculty role is augmentation concentrated at the administrative end while the irreducibly human tasks (in-person fitness assessment, therapeutic recreation practicum supervision, real-time exercise technique correction) remain as fully human as they were in Hitchcock's gymnasium in 1861.

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Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1861
Latest US employment12,630 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$77,270 (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 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19203,200n/aEst., Montclair State University Researched contextReport
196012,000n/aEst., NIRSA Researched contextReport
1964n/a$7,200Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
197521,000n/aEst., NIRSA Timeline Researched contextReport
2000n/a$44,000Est., BLS OOH Researched contextReport
200314,780$44,470BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200415,470$44,320BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200516,530$45,890BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200617,110$49,270BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200717,500$52,170BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200817,410$55,140BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200916,850$55,370BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201017,720$57,650BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201118,660$57,840BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201219,410$57,920BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201318,820$57,690BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201418,650$58,280BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201517,980$59,280BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201617,390$59,180BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201716,630$60,150BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201816,490$62,620BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201915,880$64,380BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202014,730$66,290BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202113,860$72,440BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202213,400$72,650BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202313,270$75,770BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202412,680$75,890BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202512,630$77,270BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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