After a Year of Losses, Higher Ed’s Work Force Is Growing Again

After shedding a net of 660,000 workers over the course of the pandemic, the labor force that powers America’s colleges and universities finds itself growing again at a steady, if uneven, pace. Since 2021 began, higher education has recovered a third of the labor force it shed in 2020, with the sector adding an estimated 90,000 jobs in May, according to preliminary seasonally adjusted estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s on top of a net of 153,000 jobs added since December of last year, when the number of jobs hit its lowest point during the pandemic.

Higher education’s gains parallel those of the wider economy, where the overall unemployment rate for June 2021 came in at 5.9 percent, down from a high of 14.8 percent in April 2020.

Still, uncertainty abounds. The highly contagious Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is now the dominant strain in the United States. At the same time, vaccine hesitancy among large numbers of people, along with the loosening of many public-health restrictions in several states, has presented obstacles to efforts to tame the virus. And, as it has in many other industries, the pandemic has and will continue to reconfigure higher education’s labor force in ways not yet fully understood or anticipated.

Between February 2020 and December 2020, a cumulative net of 660,000 workers were laid off or left the work force that supports higher education. The net loss in jobs was so large that it erased more than a decade of job gains within the industry, with higher ed’s work force matching its size in February 2008.

Earlier this year, The Chronicle identified several changes within higher ed’s work force spurred by the emergence of Covid-19 in the U.S. 12 months earlier. The Chronicle found workers of color endured a disproportionate share of job losses relative to the size of that population in the work force.