Some interesting news in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber site) today:
The data appeared in a report, “Staff in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2003, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Faculty, 2003-04,” published by the National Center for Education Statistics. … The report, which contains data on higher-education employees by gender, race, institution type, and other factors, also sheds light on hiring trends in different job categories. For example, while the number of faculty members at degree-granting institutions rose 5 percent from 2001 to 2003, the number of executive and other top administrators jumped by 20 percent and the number of instruction and research assistants grew by 12 percent.
The Chronicle also noted that “A large proportion of those new hires ended up at for-profit colleges and universities, whose faculties rocketed up from about 36,000 in 2001 to nearly 52,000 in 2003.”
In other words, while traditional universities were busy creating sinecures, for-profit institutions were busy hiring instructors ? seeing a 44 percent growth rate in their faculty. By way of comparison, that is nearly nine times the rate of growth at traditional institutions in faculty (but only two and a half times the rate of growth in executives and administrators).
