College Staff Continue to be Unsung Heroes
For many of us in higher education, the staff that work at colleges and universities are unsung heroes. After all, most faculty are protected by tenure and academic freedom. Administrators also have a great deal of autonomy and job security. Yet, staff members –whether a department secretary or someone working out of the sight of most people – are usually badly paid, lack many opportunities for advancement and can oftentimes be dismissed rather easily.
Faculty, administrators, and students are all part of the public consciousness, but little is known about staff. Now a new report is shedding some light about these little known, but invaluable people.
A study titled “Staff in Higher Education Salary Report: Key Findings, Trends, and Comprehensive Tables for the 2016-17 Academic Year” published last May is providing some very interesting and sometimes surprising information.
Among the findings are that higher education staff have an annualized median pay of $35,000, hardly enough to sustain a family unless someone else in the household is also working. Among them, the skilled craft workers are the highest paid, and service/maintenance workers the lowest.
As expected, there is also a great deal of geographic variation when it comes to salaries, with schools in the Northeast paying the most and those in the South paying the least. Yet, once adjusted for cost of living the salaries come out to be about the same.
One surprising finding is that racial/ethnic minorities are underrepresented in college and university staffs in all but service/maintenance positions. Although women are well represented in all staff areas except skilled crafts, they are paid less than men in all areas except office/clerical work. When it comes to ethnicity, there is also a minority pay gap for all but office/ clerical positions.
Also, the gender pay gap is greater among older employees. The study found that experience – measured by number of years in a position – does not mitigate this imbalance, as the pay gap is also greater for those with more seniority. The authors of the report also found that there is a wide age range for staff positions, ranging from the early 20s to age 65 and beyond. The exception is in the area of skilled craft positions, where most are likely to be in their late 40s and early 50s.
The authors of this study were Jacqueline Bichsel and Jasper McChesney, who produced it for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR). They found that the overall median years in a position for higher education staff was four. The lowest turnover is among skilled craft workers in the Northeast, who have a median of 11 years in their position.
These authors surveyed 737 institutions, which provided data on 169,358 staff for the 149 position types studied. The colleges and universities they analyzed are well represented by type of institution classification (research-focused, comprehensive universities, community colleges, etc.), affiliation and region.
The survey findings are very comprehensive and included key demographic variables, including gender, race/ethnicity, birth year (estimated age), and years in position for all the positions surveyed. The survey was carried out online between November 2016 and February 2017, and is available here.
The question for us now is how to use the information provided by the study to improve higher education in this country. First of all, we have to remind ourselves of the role played by staff in higher education. And for that we can use a couple of examples. First, take department secretaries. They are the ones who represent the “face” of the university – departments and other academic and non-academic units – to students. They are the first ones to field questions about class schedules, availability of faculty, forms that need to be filled, etc. They are also the ones that make sure that facilities are in good order, and that all the equipment for common uses, such as photocopiers, are working properly. They have to order supplies, contact other offices to coordinate actions, etc. By now you get the picture: universities couldn’t operate without them.
Then, think about the work done by others in less visible but equally important roles, from the budget office, to admissions, to the library. All these people are responsible for keeping the institutional machinery working. They are the ones who provide data that administrators need continuously to make decisions about budget, student services, and to comply with a myriad of regulations whether they are internal, state, or federal ones.
Yet, when we ask staff what they need the most they do not ask for public credit. They ask for decent salaries and opportunities for keeping up to date with new techniques that will allow them to do their jobs better. But given the financial crisis that we are going through in higher education, that is the kind of support that gets eliminated first. If you combine a lack of economic resources with the lack of recognition that they also receive from their colleagues and the educational community in general, then what you have is a morale issue that sooner or later will affect their productivity, which, in turn, will make institutions less effective.
Interestingly, many staff people are oftentimes alumni of the very institutions where they work. They know what it means to be on the side of the students who need their services. They are the ones who grew up where their institutions are located and know their impact in the culture and economy of the regions they serve.
It is time for us to recognize the value of staff members if we really want to advance our colleges and universities
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College Staff Continue to be Unsung Heroes