How Budget Cuts and a Loss of Trust Threaten Higher Ed’s Workforce

Hiring freezes, restricted travel budgets, salary caps, budget cuts—colleges’ responses to the uncertainty blanketing the sector are causing “ripple effects” across the higher ed workforce that observers say could lead to the loss of a generation of talent.

The consequences of the sector’s financial instability and ongoing government attacks include anxiety among faculty and staff feeling the strain of hiring freezes, uncertainty about internal grant opportunities and even questions about having enough staff on hand to continue delivering basic services, said Kevin McClure, a professor of higher education and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

The current environment could dissuade others from considering higher ed as a place to build a long-term career, McClure said in a recent episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast.

He added that leaders who have compromised their institutional values in response to political pressure have eroded the trust of their campus communities.

“We are in an environment where it’s just really hard to do good work,” McClure said. “There is no doubt that the workforce in higher education, broadly, is really struggling.”

Even before the second Trump administration took office, surveys showed that about a quarter of the higher ed workforce had experienced some kind of burnout. A study from the Healthy Minds Network released in October showed that 25 percent of surveyed faculty and staff said their job had taken a negative toll on their mental or emotional health. Another 27 percent said they feel a “high” or “very high” degree of burnout because of their work.

McClure anticipates higher education will face problems akin to the K–12 sector in attracting people to teach and work in schools. “Much of that is a manifestation of policy choices that were made that have had the effect of demoralizing teachers in the teaching profession,” he said. “I foresee something similar happening in higher education, where the multiple rounds of policy choices and what those choices have resulted in across institutions, is going to make it more difficult for us to convince people that this is a viable profession where they can expect some level of security and where they can do their version of good work and do work according to their values.”

While many of the ills plaguing the sector are not of its own making—including cuts to research funding, a declining number of 18-year-olds and decreased funding from state lawmakers—institutions are not adequately responding to the moment, he said. “I have spent a lot of time on college campuses working with senior leaders, looking at strategic plans. We are not doing a good enough job articulating our values to people within our own organizations to let them know this is what this place is all about,” he said. “We have seen some backsliding, some backtracking, some revisions of our websites—all of these signposts suggesting to people who work here that the things we stand for are actually maybe really flexible and can be modified as the political winds blow. And that, for me, is not what values are all about.”

He worries that higher education leaders have not prepared for this moment. “There is the need for some internal trust-building right now as a crucial defense mechanism if we are going to make it through the next couple of years,” he said.

Low salaries across the sector contribute to the “constellation” of factors that make a higher ed career a hard sell, McClure said. The American Association of University Professors’ annual faculty pay survey reported the inflation-adjusted average salary for continuing, full-time faculty has increased for two years in a row. However, faculty pay still hasn’t returned to fall 2019 levels. Similarly, a CUPA-HR survey found that across higher ed, employees are being paid less in inflation-adjusted dollars than they were before the pandemic.

“[Low pay] is a significant challenge. It has been around for a long time. However … the depth of the problem, I think, has increased in the sense that we are falling further behind because of our inability to keep pace with inflation, keep pace with living expenses,” McClure said. “It’s not just about by what percentage does somebody’s pay increase year over year. It’s really thinking about the whole picture for someone, which is to say, ‘How feasible is it for someone to build a life here based on how they’re being compensated?’”

Hourly workers and staff whom “we absolutely need in order to sustain institutions and do the good work that we do” are finding it difficult to make a living, especially as colleges tend to drive up the cost of living in their local areas, he said.

Ensuring employees have a voice in the difficult decisions institutional leaders are making in response to the fraught environment is important, McClure said, stressing that the challenges the sector is facing can benefit from shared governance.

“It is a good thing to have the involvement of on-the-ground faculty and staff prior to major academic decisions. There are multiple, multiple cases of changes that have gone sideways or not been effective because they weren’t really thinking about the end user—the end user being the person teaching in the classroom, the person delivering this curriculum, this person advising students,” he said.

He conceded that the structure of shared governance comes with its own set of challenges, but encouraged faculty and staff to train their peers in how to participate in shared governance to improve it: “Shared governance is … a practice and we ought to think about how we can invest in those relationships now as soon as possible, so we’re prepared for the hard decisions that we’re likely going to have to face.”