Trends in Employment at US Colleges and Universities, 1987–2013

Another category that has grown steadily relative to the others is other professionals, which includes a broad set of workers, including human resources specialists, computer specialists, lawyers, and librarians. This category grew from 18 percent of employees in 1987 to 26 percent in 2011. The growth of this category suggests that there has been an increase in the number of support staff who themselves are college educated. Whether the increase is seen as desirable or undesirable may depend on which occupations within the category are responsible for the increase, but this cannot be determined from the 1987–2011 data. The 2013 data that I discuss later may provide some insight into the relative sizes of several occupations within this category.

In contrast to faculty and other professionals, the share of employees who are in the clerical and secretarial category has steadily fallen, from 20 percent in 1987 to 12 percent in 2011. The other categories have remained roughly flat, although there is a slight decline in the relative size of the service/maintenance category. The reasons for this decline are not discernable from the IPEDS data alone, although one possibility is the type of on-site outsourcing discussed by Goldschmidt and Schmieder (2015). Finally, perhaps counter to conventional wisdom, the share of employees in executive, administrative, and managerial jobs has not risen dramatically over time.

The share of faculty who are full-time employees has indeed fallen over time (figure 2). On the other hand, the shares of employees in the other categories who work full time have not changed appreciably.

In recent years there has been roughly an equal number of full-time employees who are faculty and who are in the other professionals category (figure 3). Moreover, figure 3 reflects the fact that the growth in the other professionals category observed in figure 1 is coming about due to growth in full-time employees in this category, whereas figure 4 reflects the fact that the growth in faculty seen in figure 1 can be accounted for by growth in part-time faculty. However, the share of full-time employees who are faculty has not changed dramatically. Additionally, the shares of part-time employees and full-time employees who are administrators have also stayed steady. These patterns suggest that the number of full-time equivalent faculty may have actually risen relative to the number of full-time equivalent administrators.

The shares of faculty who are full-time employees differ by institutional control—public, not-for-profit private, and for-profit. The percentage of full-time faculty is higher in the public sector than in the private sector, which is in turn higher than in the for-profit sector (figure 5). Furthermore, the decline in the share of full-time faculty discussed above has occurred in every sector. It is not, for example, solely an artifact of the growing size of the for-profit sector, which employs a higher share of part-time faculty than the other two sectors do.

The data using the new IPEDS classification scheme are consistent with the results using the earlier scheme. About 41 percent of employees are instructional staff, research staff, or public service staff in 2013 (table 1).⁹ But even though the instructional staff category represents only 37 percent of employees overall, this is still the largest employment category by a wide margin. The next-largest categories are office and administrative support (13 percent); management occupations (8 percent); computer, engineering, and science occupations (7 percent); and service occupations (7 percent).

*Note: C/SS/L/A/D/E/S/M stands for community, social service, legal, arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations.
Source: Author’s calculations from IPEDS data, National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education.

Who exactly are the other professionals in the 1987–2011 data? Some information about this may be gleaned by examining the occupational mix in 2013 along with the crosswalk between the earlier and later IPEDS employment classification mentioned earlier. In particular, the category computer, engineering, and science occupations and the category business and financial operations occupations both have fairly large employment shares (7 percent and 6 percent, respectively) and both, according to the aforementioned crosswalk, include employees that would be included in the other professionals category. In the case of the post-2012 business and financial operations occupations category, all of the employees in that category would have been included in the pre-2012 other professionals category. This suggests that a fairly high share of the other professionals are individuals who work in business and financial operations occupations. 

On the other hand, the post-2012 computer, engineering, and science occupations category also includes employees who would fall under the technical and paraprofessional category. Moreover, it is not clear from the data how many of the computer, engineering, and science occupations employees would be considered other professionals and how many would fall under the technical and paraprofessional category. The fact that the workers in the post-2012 computer, engineering, and science occupations category would fall under multiple pre-2012 categories illustrates the difficulty of making comparisons between the pre-2012 data and the post-2012 data.

When comparing the results for 2013 across the three sectors, it is clear that the employment mix at for-profits is quite different than the employment mix of the other two sectors (table 2). Instructional staff comprise a higher percentage of employees at for-profits than in the other two sectors, although this is due to the prevalence of part-time instructional staff at for-profits. In contrast to public colleges and private colleges, for-profits employ virtually no research staff. For-profits also have a lower share in the business and financial operations category; the computer, engineering, and science occupations category; the service occupations category; and the healthcare practitioners and technical occupations category compared to the other two sectors. For-profits have a higher share of employees in the student and academic affairs category and the sales and related occupations category. These differences are generally in line with the business model of for-profits described by Deming, Goldin, and Katz (2012).

*Note: C/SS/L/A/D/E/S/M stands for community, social service, legal, arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations.
Source: Author’s calculations from IPEDS data, National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education.

Conclusion

The results of this analysis suggest that the share of employees at colleges who are administrators has not been much higher in recent years than it was in 1987. There has been growth, though, in the other professionals employment category. This growth is potentially related to a growth of amenities and other programs outside of the teaching and research that have been the traditional focus of colleges and universities, although this is difficult to ascertain due to the broad nature of this category. An additional result in the analysis is that the share of faculty who are full-time employees has been declining. This decline has occurred within the public sector, the private sector, and the for-profit sector.

One limitation of the analysis here is that it considers only employment and not spending on salaries, amenities, or anything else. However, I plan to address spending by colleges and universities in a future Economic Commentary.