Ask almost any enrollment manager, financial-aid director, student-life manager, or counseling-center director, and you’ll hear that the pain of staffing shortages is pervasive across higher education.
The staffing crisis is particularly pronounced at community colleges, which lost 13 percent of their work force between 2020 and early 2022, but other public and private institutions are feeling stretched, too. We all know higher education is out of step with the employment market, and has been since the pandemic began. We have too many unfilled staff openings, too few qualified candidates, and too much market competition for talent.
Since early 2020, the change in staff attitudes and priorities has felt like a seismic shift. While managers have tried desperately to “get back to business” and reach organizational goals, many staff employees have said, “No thank you,” to previous ways of working. They want more flexibility, more work-life balance, more purpose in what they do, and more compensation for doing it.
Such sentiments are not unique to academe, of course. We all seem to collectively feel like we deserve a reward for surviving the last few years, and we are determined to get that reward from our work — via better positions, higher pay, and more remote-work options.
But meeting those demands is a tough ask for most of higher education. We’re not known for being highly responsive to market trends or for offering competitive pay. Throw in the added challenges of demographic-driven enrollment drops and weakened public support for the value of a college degree, and you start to see why it’s hard for any institution that isn’t wealthy to make the workplace adjustments employees want.
In previous generations, colleges and universities offered their staff and administrative employees a strong sense of contributing to the public good or of being part of a greater mission — intrinsic values that, in some ways, compensated for other shortcomings (like, say, salaries lower than the private sector’s). But in recent years, institutions have experienced mission drift as they (a) come under increasing financial pressure to improve the bottom line, and (b) lose many of the regional and religious identity markers that made them distinctive. For staff employees, the intrinsic benefits are no longer compelling enough to keep them working on a college campus in a “do more with less” environment.
So when it comes to hiring and retaining good staff people, what can a less-selective, budget-strapped institution do if it can’t afford to boost pay and benefits, and if offering employees a strong sense of purpose is no longer a convincing inducement to work on a college campus?
The answer I’m suggesting here: a two-part strategy that involves a shift in where we look for new employees and a change in what we offer them.
Where Do We Look?
One of the challenges of hiring and retaining staff members is that we are often looking for the employees of the past. Campuses want to recruit people with relevant experience, who don’t need training, and who are willing to work long and flexible hours for standard pay. Nowadays, however, experienced job candidates are able to leverage their background as a selling point. They trade up institutions or leave higher education altogether for the burgeoning ed-tech industry or the business world.
The real hiring opportunity for every nonprestigious institution? Mobilize and value your own graduates.
Many of us have come to think of our students only as our customers, and not as an extension of our community or as a next generation to whom we are passing the torch. That explains many of the challenges that institutions face in generating donations from recent alumni. Institutions are missing an opportunity to build our own work force — one that believes in the value of our particular educational experience.
Although they may lack work experience, many of these graduates are well suited to help with the very problems that plague us. For example, one of the worst areas of crisis for campus staffing is technology. New graduates tend to be savvy about technology and able to learn new software more quickly than many older professionals. Or consider the seemingly endless need for more mental-health support on campus. Who would better understand students’ needs on this front than their recent peers, who could act as a first-line of support in many situations? Who better to give insights on student success, and where we’re falling short, than those who have just experienced it?
Ironically, this is not so much a new strategy as it is a return to a highly effective historical practice that we seem to have forgotten in our rush to seem prestigious and launch national searches.
This past fall I co-wrote an essay in The Chronicle, “3 Ways to Fix Hiring in Financial Aid,” with two professionals who got their start in the field as student workers and noted how, historically, they have been the best source of financial-aid leaders. If you polled late-career professionals in housing, student life, or the registrar’s office, they would very likely tell you the same.
We all know that higher education tends to lack formal training processes — the noncorporate nature of the campus workplace is one of the factors that attracts people to staff careers. This informality makes it even more helpful to hire recent graduates who already know our procedures and systems. To capture the value of this natural advantage, however, we need to make the staff career path an easy and obvious one for future employees.
What does it say to community-college graduates if their degree is not enough to get them an entry-level job at their own institution? Why don’t we focus more of our financial-aid assistance on work-study opportunities that would give students on-the-job training for future work with us? Some areas of our campuses are so focused on students as “the problem” (dealing with their needs becomes an interruption to our agenda) that we ignore them as “the solution.”
Imagine shifting our mind-set to see every student as a potential future employee, whether at graduation or years in the future.
What Do We Offer Them?
To make this kind of “grow-your-own” recruiting as effective as possible, institutions need to know how to attract and retain the best young professionals. In a 2019 study by LinkedIn, one benefit exceeded all others in its ability to retain workers, especially younger workers: the opportunity to learn something new. Fully 94 percent of respondents said they would stay longer with their company if it invested in their education and training.
This is where educational institutions should have the overwhelming advantage, since teaching people how to learn is what we do. If we put more intentional effort into helping our employees grow, they might commit more to helping our institutions grow as well.
We see this in action when colleges offer employees tuition remission to pursue an advanced degree, which often contributes to retention. In the case of a community college, why not hire a new graduate but partner with a nearby four-year institution to help them earn an advanced degree?
But a true commitment goes way beyond offering formal degrees. Neglect to build personal and professional development into the job itself and the staff member will simply leave when the new degree is completed. True learning is helping an employee to develop new skills and to mature as a person. Young workers in particular need opportunities to refine their emotional intelligence, discover their strengths and weaknesses, learn to work in teams. Attending a conference, participating on a regional committee, or being involved in an association can be an eye-opening realization that they belong to a profession with a future.
We don’t need to overcomplicate this. Learning opportunities can be very simple, and include the kinds of things that institutions routinely do for faculty members but not for the staff:
- Connect new staff hires with a mentor, inside or outside the institution.
- Pay for a staff member to tackle a new type of software or to complete courses on LinkedIn.
- Set aside time for regular development conversations between staff members and their supervisor. That can go a long way toward helping new staff hires to see themselves as a match for higher education. In my first position I was encouraged to make a long-term career plan, with goals for what I wanted to accomplish in each decade of my career. I still have that plan 25 years later, and my goals were pretty accurate.
Creating learning opportunities does not have to be a burden on managers, either. Some can be outsourced to assessment and coaching companies. Some of them offer dashboards that allow team members to take work-style and personality tests, offer daily coaching notes, and more in-depth analysis of how to best work with others on the team.
Campuses could develop their own staff-development programs, like the ones corporations have used for years. We could place new employees into management-training programs and give them success markers to hit as they advance in their careers.
Think of how much stronger our institutions could be in staffing, policy, and collaboration if we rotated new staff employees between a few strategic offices during their first few months on the job, naturally breaking down the silos that so often hamstring us.
A New Business Model
Almost any other industry would be thrilled to have the pool of homegrown talent that higher education can access. We have always been a people-focused business. That can work against us when we need to cut budgets and control costs, but it should work for us in the area of cultivating and hiring talent.
Now is the time to think about sparking a renaissance of sorts in higher-education staffing. As the large baby-boom generation retires from the employment rolls, we have an opportunity to transfer their accumulated knowledge to a whole new generation of potential higher-ed champions. Instead of lamenting the lack of qualified candidates, let’s start cultivating our own and keeping them motivated by offering them access to learning — like only we can.
