Friday, November 21, 2014

The Shrinking Academic Workforce - Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

The academic workforce is shrinking. Not by much, mind you: the number of faculty members and administrators at colleges eligible to award federal financial aid declined by a mere 7,500 from 2012 to 2013, according to new Education Department statistics. But the dip, however small, is the first in many years. The percentage drop in the number of employees, which the National Center for Education Statistics puts at 0.19 percent, to 3,969,396 in 2013 from 3,976,803 in 2012, is actually larger than the enrollment decline that the report also documents. Overall enrollments fell by about 300,000 (to 20.85 million from 21.15 million) in 2013, about evenly split between for-profit institutions and public two-year institutions. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/14/number-college-employees-declines-slightly