Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs

This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “Solving Higher Ed’s Staffing Crisis,” available in the Chronicle Store.

My first full-time job in higher education was coordinating a global-studies living-learning program, and I loved it. That love propelled me to pour my time into the program, logging hours on nights and weekends. All those hours didn’t change a fundamental fact: It was a dead-end job.

I was the third coordinator in five years, and my training consisted of a binder my predecessor left me. As the only full-time employee in an office on the outskirts of the organizational chart, I reported to an associate director who had no plans of leaving and whose experience and education placed that person several pay grades above me.

It was early in 2009, and I was happy to have a job. But I couldn’t be expected to stand in the doorway of my career forever. At some point, I would want to grow and maybe even be considered for a promotion. Yet a career ladder was never discussed because there was none. If I excelled at my job, I would advance exactly to where I already was. The first time my future was explicitly mentioned was in a surprise meeting with a dean informing me of the institution’s intent to end the program.

Despite the hand-wringing about administrative bloat, the reality is that many of our colleges are bottom-heavy employment hierarchies. For every provost, director, or dean, there are multiple coordinators, assistants, and lecturers. And as Shaun Harper, a professor of business and education and executive director of the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, has noted, it’s also a racialized hierarchy, with people of color more likely in positions with the least mobility. As was true in my first position, often the only way to advance or get a raise is to leave, giving rise to the popular adage: “You have to move out to move up.” So people leave. Or they pursue additional credentials in the hopes it will remove barricades to career mobility. Or they simmer in silence while feeling stuck.

It’s hard to conclude anything other than that higher education has done a spectacularly bad job of managing talent. Campuses have evolved over centuries and dedicated resources to perfect the art and science of human development, while largely outsourcing or ignoring the professional growth and learning of their employees. Rather than draw upon their own experts to develop and retain workers, institutions let employees burn out, and then replace them.

When I floated the idea of dead-end jobs in higher education on Twitter, I was floored by the volume and breadth of responses. Advising, admissions, advancement, and academic departments all got called out. Contingent faculty facetiously asked: “What is a career ladder?” People shared stories of “promotions in title only,” in which a person earned additional responsibilities but no additional pay. Stories of administrative assistants who earned graduate degrees and new skills but could never be viewed as anything except secretaries. Stories of promised advancement that never materialized.

Katrina Bailey, for example, who worked in an academic-advising office in a community college, wrote about the frustration she had seen firsthand. When I spoke to her, she said that advising became a cornerstone of her institution’s quality-enhancement plan, and new middle-management positions were created in her office. “Every single one of my friends and colleagues who applied and were full-time employees,” she recalled, “none of them got those positions.” Instead, the college’s leaders shifted employees from other areas into the openings. “It just started really feeling like … you have to move outside of the institution to find any type of upper movement in advising.”

In an article for the National Association of Colleges and Employers on strategies for retaining employees, Carrie Hawes and Samara Reynolds suggested that college leaders “make talent management and development priority one.” They pointed to a Pew Research Center survey showing that, among the top reasons why U.S. workers left their jobs in 2021, “no opportunities for advancement” was second only to low compensation. Talent management was front of mind for Hawes, who moved from higher education to the corporate world. She told me that she and her co-author interacted frequently with employers and “would see what recruiters were offering to students. And we’d ask, ‘Why don’t we do that here?’”

Hawes worked at four institutions and often felt that talking about her future was “very secretive.” She experienced a different approach to talent management when she moved to a large professional-services firm: “When someone asks, What do you want to do next? I’m like, Am I allowed to talk about what I want?” She’s come to believe “the whole model of ‘we want you to grow, we want you to be fulfilled in your career’ is so foreign to higher education.”

Dead-end jobs are not limited to staff positions. Many full-time faculty enjoy some semblance of a career ladder, and some have access to regular professional development through programs for new faculty and centers for teaching excellence. Even so, faculty members aren’t immune to feeling like they’re in a career cul-de-sac. Many people in part-time roles can’t access these opportunities, making it possible for trained and talented educators to become “perennial adjuncts.” And professional growth and learning opportunities have a way of drying up for faculty who are post-tenure or have been at their institutions for a long time.

Samantha Streamer Veneruso, who spent 25 years as a professor and in several leadership positions at a community college before taking a role at the American Geophysical Union, wrote her dissertation on faculty-leadership development. “We don’t have a clear career path for faculty … Your career path is within teaching. That’s it,” she told me. “Those who expand out and go into administration are viewed with suspicion.” Some midcareer faculty step into administrative roles reluctantly or take on ad hoc service roles. “And that’s not really a career path per se,” she explained. “They want to do something more, but the experiences don’t necessarily come together cohesively or draw on strengths.” Even the highest-performing engines can stall without proper care. Yet we often assume faculty will simply keep running until they retire.

It’s not the case that every employee wants to ascend the ranks of leadership. Jaime Hunt organized a culture survey while serving as the chief marketing officer at Miami University in Ohio. “One of the things people were expressing,” she explained, “was that they felt stuck. They didn’t see paths for advancement. That you needed to leave the institution to make more.” A committee that had the task of analyzing the survey uncovered frustration that the only path to earn more was taking on management roles. “Not everyone wanted to be supervisors. They wanted to have their skills and expertise recognized.”

Perhaps higher education could be extended grace for being behind when it comes to developing its workers. In An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey of the Harvard Graduate School of Education describe their research on companies that weave supporting employees’ development into everyday operations. One feature that sets these “deliberately developmental organizations” apart is their investment in the principle that adults can and need to keep growing. “This principle,” they write, “represents a discontinuous departure from the fundamental operation of nearly all organizations in every sector we’ve explored (including, ironically, education).”

A natural response to the call for more career pathways and professional development is to look to human-resources offices for fixes. The problem is that many of these offices are understaffed, forcing higher-education professionals to narrowly focus on technical details of employment. Kegan and Lahey argue that while forward-thinking organizations have long empowered human resources to support the ongoing development of employees, deliberately developmental organizations diffuse the responsibility widely — everyone is involved.

Colleges may never fully achieve the status of deliberately developmental organizations, but leaders can do something to take a step forward. Here are a few examples:

Develop homegrown leaders and training managers. Will Simpkins, vice president for student affairs at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, told me that at one point during the pandemic, his financial-aid office was down 40 percent of its typical staff. The demands of responding to Covid-19 illuminated the need for a “more inclusive leadership model,” in which leaders felt empowered to make decisions and had the skills they needed to be successful.

Human resources created several new leadership-development programs, but those programs couldn’t tackle the needs of every unit. “There’s a partnership that has to happen between HR and our functional units,” Simpkins said. “The specific competencies of being a student-affairs professional or enrollment-management professional. That’s us. We have to invest there.” Instead of focusing on information sharing, leadership meetings now focus on competency-driven professional development. And his office is paying attention to training newly promoted employees. “We absolutely want to promote from within and give career mobility, but it’s on us to make sure we’re investing in you and creating opportunities for you to grow your skill set.”

Make career tracks and ladders explicit. The committee that Jaime Hunt organized when she was the vice president and chief communications and marketing manager at Miami University proposed two career tracks: one for managers who wanted to supervise and one for non-managers. “We felt it was important to create a framework that would allow people to be recognized for their achieved level of expertise as well as whatever professional development they’ve done, both managerial and non-managerial,” Hunt explained.

Each track has a career ladder with defined responsibilities and qualifications. Senior directors applied the framework to their departments and made recommendations for people who were eligible to move through the new tracks. The goal wasn’t to guarantee promotions or hand out new titles, Oprah-style. “We were super careful not to give a promotion just because they’ve been in a role a certain amount of time,” said Hunt. But those whose experience and growth merited promotion took on new challenges and were given a raise.

Invest in coaching and cross-training. Carrie Hawes shared that at the large professional-services firm where she now works, she has both a supervisor and a coach. “We have two different people who are supporting our growth. So someone who is maybe helping me with my work and telling me what to do. But then someone whose job is to help me figure out how I need to grow. So it doesn’t fall on the same person.”

Employees are also encouraged to take on short-term projects with other teams. “In higher ed, we pigeonhole ourselves into functional areas, and so the ability to get that skill in a different functional area and move throughout the organization isn’t always as open and free flowing,” Hawes said. Working with another team temporarily can help her gain technical skills. “Because the hope is that I’ll stay with the organization and use those skills somewhere else.”

College leaders can continue to lean heavily on hiring new workers in a competitive market, or they can nourish the substantial talent that already exists on their campuses. As Steve Cadigan, former chief human-resource officer for LinkedIn, explained: “If you want to compete, you’re going to have to be a place that grows talent. … The future of work is the future of learning — you have to become a talent-development business.”

In a new era of worker empowerment, higher education needs to create better career pathways and step up as a world leader in harnessing the full potential of its employees. The good news is that colleges have everything they need to make it happen.