Community Colleges Struggle to Attract Faculty Applicants

Community Colleges Struggle to Attract Faculty Applicants

Public Universities See Spike According to PowerSchool’s Higher Education TalentIndex Report

FOLSOM, Calif. — October 8, 2018 — Compared to public universities, community colleges across the U.S. find it difficult to attract applicants for open faculty positions. According to the 2018 TalentIndex: Higher Education Benchmark Report from PowerSchool, community colleges experienced a 35 percent decrease in applications per job posting, while public universities saw an increase of 21 percent. 
Released today, the report from the PowerSchool Education Research Forum highlights the trends and challenges expected to have the largest influence on U.S.-based academic and administrative options. While some institutions, like community colleges, struggle to fill faculty positions, higher education hiring remains strong overall. 
At the same time, many institutions face significant challenges from budget constraints, technology consolidation, and difficulty measuring talent management performance.
Respondents in the survey selected budget constraints as their top challenge more than twice as often as other concerns, like providing competitive compensation and insufficient technology infrastructure. Budget limitations greatly hinder respondents’ collective ability to make better hiring decisions.    
“With declining enrollment and increasing concerns around affordability, higher education institutions seek to control the areas that have the biggest impact on educational outcomes and revenue,” said Rishi Rana, GM of higher education, PowerSchool. “One way to accomplish this efficiently is through technology which can give higher education professionals insights and tools to streamline hiring efforts, improve onboarding processes, and retain the best faculty and staff members.”   
The report reveals the challenges higher education institutions face around integrating electronic processes, efficiently tracking data, and monitoring talent management. Additionally, many institutions still largely rely on paper-based processes, indicating room for efficiency and oversight improvements.  
Key findings of PowerSchool’s 2018 TalentIndex: Higher Education Benchmark Report include:  

  • On average, colleges and universities take 10 days longer to fill faculty than staff positions. However, nearly 50 percent of survey respondents labeled faculty recruitment as their talent management top priority.  
  • Sixty-four percent of institutions express difficulty using predictive data to guide decisions and only 11 percent do so easily. 
  • Survey respondents list reporting and analyzing data as the two least efficient processes.  
  • Higher education leaders state search committee management, annual faculty reviews, and faculty performance management as major focus areas in 2018. 
  • Almost 32 percent of institutions don’t use data, or use it minimally, to drive decision making and identify areas of improvement, and only 27 percent use data regularly for these purposes. 

For more details on the 2018 PowerSchool TalentIndex Higher Education Benchmark Report, visit https://www.peopleadmin.com/talentindex/ 
Follow @MyPowerSchool on Twitter and join the conversation using #TalentIndex to share the results with your network  
About the Talent Index: A Higher Education Benchmark Report from the PowerSchool Education Research Forum  
At the end of 2017, PeopleAdmin surveyed 160 higher education professionals from all institution types and sizes across the United States. Forty percent of respondents are directors or managers. Twenty-nine percent identified as executive leadership- chancellor/president, vice president, dean, provost, executive director, and assistant provost and dean.  
About PowerSchool: 
At PowerSchool, we believe in the simple truth that every student deserves the best opportunities in life. That’s why our mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their potential, in their way. From the back office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool helps schools and districts efficiently manage instruction, learning, grading, attendance, assessment, analytics, state reporting, special education, student registration, talent, finance and HR.  Visit http://www.powerschool.com to learn more. 
PowerSchool Media Contact
Josh Morgan
Senior Director, Corporate Communications at PowerSchool
public.relations@powerschool.com