Faculty Aren’t The Only Ones With Careers at Universities
Universities and colleges may have had to streamline their employment rolls in recent years, but they still employ more than two-and-a-half million people — and by far most of them are not faculty members.
After all, just about every job that exists outside of academia is replicated on a campus, from chief cooks and bottlewashers to attorneys, accountants, computer operators, personnel managers, and police officers.
And because the demand for some of those professions is growing outside the academy, salaries on campus are going up, according to Kirk Beyer, chair of the Administrative Compensation Survey Committee for the College and University Personnel Association (CUPA).
“The speculation is that administrative positions cross outside education and there is more of a market for those positions…. Over the past four cars, they have averaged salary increases of 4.2 percent as opposed to 3.2 percent for [people employed in] student services,” Beyer said.
Computer Technology
One of the highest areas of demand currently at colleges and universities is in computers, according to Linda Jack, manager of staff employment at Stanford University. She said that in the last two years there has been an explosion of computer-related positions being created in higher education — and she predicts that the trend will continue.
