For the third quarter in a row, HigherEdJobs found in its Higher Education Employment Report that the number of jobs on college campuses has been decreasing across the United States, and the rate of decrease seems to be accelerating.
The report, which analyzed U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, discovered that jobs were down 1.4 percent in the last quarter, which comes out to about 23,000 jobs.
However, the report showed that advertisements and job postings increased for both universities and community colleges, while both saw a decrease in the number of jobs.
“One possible explanation is that colleges and universities may be losing increasing numbers of employees — either to other institutions, non-educational employers, or to retirement — and are choosing to fill only a portion of the vacancies,” according to a press release on the report.
When compared to job growth as a whole in the U.S., higher education jobs were found to be growing at a slower rate than other jobs.
“The third quarter of 2013 also marks the fourth quarter in a row that the overall U.S. job growth rate surpassed the growth rate for higher education jobs,” said John Ikenberry, president and co-founder of HigherEdJobs, in the executive summary. “As a result, the ‘market share’ of higher education jobs compared to all U.S. jobs declined in (the third quarter of) 2013 compared to the same quarter a year earlier.”
