NCES 'First Look' at Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2008, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Staff, 2008-09

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

---

What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

The Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) provides this freely-downloadable (PDF) report on employees of the more than 6,700 postsecondary institutions which participate in Title IV federal student financial aid programs. As usual, the data behind this report is also available from NCES. Some highlights:

• In total, the institutions employ 3.7M individuals;
• Of those 2.4M are employed by public institutions and 1.3M by private institutions, for-profit and nonprofit;
• There are 194,714 full professors, 124,653 associate professors, 134,169 assistant professors, 94,573 instructors, 28,299 lecturers, and 48,894 with no academic rank; and
• Average instructional staff salaries at public and non-profit privates were nearly the same, but salaries at for-profits were about 40 percent lower.