The Higher Ed Workplace Blog

Age 55 … that’s the median age of chief HR officers in higher ed. With a retirement boom looming, what are we, as HR leaders, doing to guide and mentor the early-career professionals who are a part of our HR organizations? HR in higher ed is a tough job, so it’s imperative that we take the time and the care to prepare our next round of leaders so they can take the reigns and continue to move the profession forward.

Each month, CUPA-HR General Counsel Ira Shepard provides an overview of some labor and employment law cases and regulatory actions with implications for the higher ed workplace. Here’s the latest from Ira.

While the employment of professionals in higher education saw an overall increase of 7 percent and grew in all areas over the past year, two areas — “other education” and “safety” — grew at a substantially faster clip than all the rest.

According to USCIS, the improvements to the system will help users enter correct information, increase the speed and accuracy of the employment eligibility verification process, decrease Tentative Nonconfirmations (TNCs), and reduce manual verifications. 

Presidents and provosts in U.S. colleges and universities tend to change jobs frequently; in fact, administrators in higher education overall tend to have fairly short tenures, with a median of five years in their position. Data from CUPA-HR’s 2017-18 Administrators in Higher Education Survey show that presidents have been in their current position for a median of five years, and provosts have an even shorter tenure, with a median of three years in their position.

Each month, CUPA-HR General Counsel Ira Shepard provides an overview of some labor and employment law cases and regulatory actions with implications for the higher ed workplace. Read the latest from Ira.

Like much of the American workforce, college and university professors are aging — the majority are between the ages of 55 and 75. As these baby boomers (who are mostly White males) near retirement, what do their successors look like? Are higher education institutions doing a good enough job of hiring more diverse faculty to complement their increasingly diverse student bodies?

It can seem like dozens of different tasks demand our attention at any given point, and while we may try to multitask in order to get them all done, that modus operandi typically ends up being counterproductive. In a couple of articles in a recent issue of CUPA-HR’s The Higher Education Workplace magazine, the authors offered advice on how to cut down on distractions and avoid time sucks in order to make the most of the time you have to get things done.

While tenure-track faculty at the nation’s colleges and universities enjoy slightly higher salaries at most ranks than do non-tenure-track faculty, those working off the tenure track are seeing bigger increases year over year than their tenure-track counterparts, according to findings from CUPA-HR’s 2017-18 Faculty in Higher Education Survey.

On May 25, new data privacy rules will take effect in the European Union. Known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this directive will also have compliance implications for colleges and universities in the United States.