Occupation / job
Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $72,990 against a $50,020 midpoint, Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other pays $22,970 a year more than the typical American job — $11.04 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
Employment as Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other is 16,580 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.
Postsecondary teaching suits people who want to keep working on a subject for decades, and who accept that the route in runs through years of training with no guarantee of a permanent post at the end.
We carry no verified training length for Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $55,910 and $102,990 — 1.8x, or $3,923 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
Even the 25th percentile pays $55,910, $5,890 more than the $50,020 typical American job and $26.87 an hour. The floor, not the median, is the strongest financial argument for Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other.
Avoid it if you need a permanent post at the end; a great deal of this teaching is done on contracts that are not.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 16,580 figure counts people already working as Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
From $55,910 to $102,990 at a ratio of 1.8x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $72,990 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.
The middle half of this field earns between $55,910 and $102,990. That is $47,080 of range, with $72,990 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $55,910 and $102,990 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $72,990. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $30,000; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $47,080.
It is $17,080 from $72,990 down to $55,910 but $30,000 up to $102,990. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $26.87 at the bottom quarter, $35.09 at the midpoint, $49.51 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $72,990 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other, the hourly figure is $72,990 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else