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.

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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.

Changing Jobs in Difficult Financial Times

This concise set of processes is written as though for a CIO, but you can replace "CIO" with your new title, and "IT" with whatever your work will be, and it still provides solid advice:

It may sound rudimentary, but scrutinize the budget. A new CIO role requires a thorough review of the technology department budget. Reviewing the last three years of budgets and "actuals" against budget may produce insights into budgeting and spending habits. For example, as a new CIO at one institution, I found $80,000 in a part-time temporary employment budget line which had not been spent in the previous three years. We were able to repurpose those funds and provide a real impact for the institution. The budget and "actual" information can also highlight items where unspecified "contingency funds" are stored. These funds may be an unofficial contingency fund or they may be funds that have been forgotten over time. Identifying these funds and putting them to good use would be a welcome move in tough economic times.

Re: Work the Forgotten Resource

Here at SCUP, we utilize up to a dozen University of Michigan work-study students at a time, so we know how valuable they can be to an organization. This article, by Kathy Kurz and Jim Scannell, for University Business magazine, examines the value to students of campus-run work programs that are more than just financial aid. If you're ever asked to plan such a program, this would be a valuable resource for you.

"Work: The Forgotten Resource to Maximize Student Opportunities"

http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1284

"Handled thoughtfully and creatively, these jobs can provide benefits that go far beyond the dollars earned. For example, they offer students a chance to connect with people on campus. Retention research conducted at many schools finds the influence of $1,000 of on-campus employment on retention is much larger than an equivalent amount of grant support.

In addition, work opportunities can be educationally purposeful or career related, giving students chances to build skills and “marketability” that can help them gain full-time employment after graduation."

"Some institutions are sweetening merit scholarship offers by tying them to research opportunities or other paid internships. Opportunities to work with a faculty member on a research project as an undergraduate—and perhaps even jointly publish findings—can be very attractive to students thinking about graduate or professional school after they complete their undergraduate degree."

The article includes a variety of information and suggestions for program elements.

Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times: 'This Is a Year of No Jobs'

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March 20—Can Strategically Aligning (or Re-Aligning) Academic Programs Help You With Your Budget Crisis?, featuring SCUPers Mary Doyle of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Karen Schmid of Purdue University. Discussants include former SCUP presidents Marv Peterson, Joan Racki, and Laura Saunders. Learn more or register now.

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Not that the academic job market has been great lately, but now it's looking so much worse. Fewer and fewer openings, and more and more of the ones there are have jumped off the tenure track:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Society’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”