Mary Romero, ASA Secretary, Arizona State University
Some ASA members and elected leaders ask me periodically whether ASA is getting too expensive for the majority of sociologists to join. This is something that the ASA Committee on the Executive Office and Budget, which I chair, and Council regularly discuss. Such concerns are always part of our decision-making process about cost-of-living dues increases, Annual Meeting and related fees, and the selection of benefits that are part of membership dues including journals, TRAILS, and various subsidies for students, emeriti/retired, and International Associates from low-income countries.
Expressed broadly, this issue is difficult for the Association to judge directly because we do not ask members what they earn, and the data that are published regularly on faculty salaries give us only general parameters for a portion (albeit a large portion) of our members. There is also the question of understanding who among all sociologists tend to view ASA membership as a professional priority.
Nevertheless we can look at the ASA membership over time and address meaningfully whether ASA membership is “only for the rich.” First, however, some context.
Fifty Years of Membership Ups and Downs
As with most member organizations, ASA’s membership has fluctuated over the last half century. It grew rapidly in the 1960s to an historic high of 14,934 in 1972, and then declined steadily in the 1970s to a low of 11,223 in 1984. A period of resurgence followed with membership reaching just over 13,000 by 1991. While it remained relatively constant across the 1990s, membership dropped to 12,368 by 2001. It then climbed rapidly back to near its historic peak, reaching 14,000 in all but one year between 2006 and 2011. The last four years have again seen declines, with final 2015 membership at 11,949.
Many factors influence these fluctuations—both changes across the discipline and higher education more generally and those within the Association. A basic and empirically answerable question regarding who joins the Association today and who maintains their membership is: Do the recent swings in total membership levels reflect a change in the composition of the membership? The short answer is “no”.
The distribution of members by basic membership status—regular, student, associate, and emeritus/retired—from 2001 through 2014 has been steady: about 52 percent are regular members, 32 percent student members, 11 percent associates, and 5 percent emeritus or retired.
Recent Membership by Income
A more nuanced question, however, is whether there have been ASA membership changes by income over this period, especially because of the financial difficulties institutions of higher education (especially state institutions) are experiencing, as well as the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession that continue to impact sociologists’ financial circumstances. The question then: Are the benefits of membership in sociology’s national disciplinary society only available to the “better off” among us? The answer again is no, but one that is made clearer with the data.
Figure 1 shows the distribution by income category of ASA’s regular members. It is important to keep in mind that ASA does not ask members about their actual income; we only ask members to select an “income category” to determine their dues amount. Changes in the ASA dues income categories occurred when an “unemployed” dues category was added in 2012 and new dues categories were broken out at the upper end of the income distribution in 2013.1
It is possible, nevertheless, for us to collapse the dues income categories to make them consistent across the 2001-2014 time period. We also adjusted the data for inflation to make the income trend among our members clearer over this period. Even though the salaries for many ASA members employed in colleges and universities have been stagnant in the last decade (Curtis and Kisielewski 2015), some of the membership shift toward higher dues categories in simple member counts is the result of the inflation of the U.S. dollar over 14 years.2 Figure 1, therefore, presents the distribution of regular members by inflation-adjusted income categories.
To see if ASA membership has become a “luxury” available only to higher-income sociologists, start at the top of Figure 1—the highest income bracket, $70,000 and above (in constant 2001 dollars). The proportion of regular members at the top end of the income distribution has remained relatively consistent since 2001, between 23 and 28 percent of all regular members. At the same time, the proportion of members in the lowest income bracket has grown slightly over this period, from 21 to 27 percent.
Despite the annual swings in the total number of ASA members over this period, the distribution of regular members by income has remained stable, with some growth among lower-income members. Given that the proportion of student members has also been stable, it seems that fears about membership being restricted to higher-income sociologists have not been realized.
Annual Meeting Attendance Growth
Sociologists who join the ASA or renew their membership tell us that the Association’s Annual Meeting is one of the major benefits of membership. Is it becoming affordable only to higher income members? Again, some context is needed.
In contrast to the membership trend, total paid registration at the ASA Annual Meeting has been increasing steadily since the early 1980s—albeit with variations from year to year. From the 2,387 paid registrants in San Francisco in 1982, meeting attendance grew steadily to 6,184 in 2013 for the New York meeting, an increase of 159 percent. While the destination city affects attendance, the general expansion in meeting attendance reflects a growing share of the membership who attend the Annual Meeting, and a growing proportion of meeting attendees who are on the program. (More than 90 percent of attendees in New York for the 2013 meeting were on the program.)
Recent Annual Meeting Attendance by Income
Who attends the Annual Meeting? ASA’s central database contains information from 2001 through 2014 that identifies individual attendees who can be matched to individual ASA member records. We chose three years from this period to reflect a range of situations: In 2003 the Atlanta meeting drew 4,078 registrants, the lowest total attendance during this period and the penultimate ASA Annual Meeting in the South. In the middle of the time period, the 2007 New York meeting attracted a very high number of registrants (6,025) in an expensive city in the Northeast. The 2014 San Francisco meeting is the most recent for which we have complete data and is a West Coast city that routinely attracts many attendees (5,952). In terms of total membership, 2003 was a relatively low year during an upswing, 2007 is the recent peak year, and 2014 was a down year as part of a multi-year decline.
As with the membership generally, the broad categories of meeting attendees were consistent across these three years. The majority of meeting attendees in 2003, 2007, and 2014 were regular or associate members (55, 56, and 53 percent respectively). Students were between 35 and 37 percent of all registrants in each of the three years, nearly all of them members. The remaining 9 to 10 percent included non-members, retirees, and secondary school teachers.
No change in the Annual Meeting attendance of students suggests that finding resources to come may have become tougher over time, but that an increasing number of students are continuing to attend and their proportion of all attendees is stable.
Figure 2 shows the distribution by income of regular members who attended these Annual Meetings. It utilizes the same inflation adjustment used for the ASA dues categories described above for Figure 1. And it shows a similar result: the proportion of those attending the Annual Meeting in 2003, 2007, and 2014 who selected the upper income range of dues grew slightly from 27 to 30 percent, as did the proportion selecting the lowest income category (from 10 to 17 percent). The majority of regular member meeting registrants came from the three “middle-income” categories in all three years, although the exact proportions fluctuated somewhat.
These data cannot tell the whole story about whether there are sociologists who would like to join the ASA and receive its benefits but cannot afford to do so. But, based on the data we do have, ASA membership and ASA Annual Meeting attendance are not shifting appreciably toward higher earners. Even on a sliding scale, the cost of ASA membership can be significant, as is the cost of travel and lodging to attend the Annual Meeting. The ASA leadership is mindful of this and works hard to keep expenses down without “watering down” the services our members and our discipline want and need. Many sociologists, therefore, continue to view both ASA membership and the Annual Meeting as worth the time and expense.
Reference
Curtis, John W. and Michael Kisielewski. 2015. The Need to Know: Faculty Salaries in Sociology and Other Disciplines, 2015. American Sociological Association.[URL]
This article is from the May/June 2016 issue of Footnotes.
Endnotes
- It is also important to note that we have no income data on members in categories other than “regular” members. Students, associates, and emeritus/retired categories each pay a set amount
- Because ASA does not collect actual income data; so the each dues category for regular members represents a range of incomes. The adjustment for inflation is an estimate based on two assumptions: that incomes have risen at the same rate as overall consumer prices, and that members are evenly distributed within the broad income categories.
