This Is Finally Being Documented

HEPI's new report, The Invisible Majority, shouldn't be read as a UK-only crisis. US universities are just as dependent on professional and support staff and just as ruthless in cutting that same workforce as financial pressures increase. When you read the report alongside the Higher Ed Dive roundup of layoffs, you understand that this is a structural pattern across Anglo-American higher ed.

If you've worked inside a private US university for a decade or more, you've seen this cycle play out about every three years. A deficit appears, "financial exigency" is declared or threatened, and the first budget item cut are professional and support staff. HEPI's report notes that professional staff make up 48% of university overheard budgets in the UK. There are some estimates that put this number at 50–65% of total operating expenditures for private US universities. The actions vary by campus and country, but they look eerily the same. Freeze hiring, suspend annual raises, and start to trim staff to find quick cash for the current fiscal year.

But what's more discouraging and troubling is what happens to leadership while all this slashing is going on. The HEPI report finds that when universities restructure under financial crises, they routinely introduce additional management layers that include expensive consultants and external "specialists," which add costs just as they are cutting the professional staff who deliver services and support. The HEPI finding is consistent with what I've seen across private US universities, where institutions pay more for "senior leaders" who prance publicly with grand flair as if they know what they're doing, then get handed more responsibility in spite of their abject failures.

The "invisible majority" in higher ed are woefully under-paid and increasingly squeezed by a systemic accountability gap. Private universities are aggressively and unapologetically cutting the people that keep the lights on while they are simultaneously protecting (and often expanding) the senior administrative layer that apparently isn't required to do anything measurable.