Dive Brief:

• Full-time staff at colleges dropped 6.6% in 2025 compared to the year before, ending several years of growth, according to data released Wednesday by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. 
• The decline was even sharper among part-time staff, whose ranks plunged by 23.9% last year, CUPA-HR’s latest survey data showed. 
• However, faculty numbers grew overall during the year. Tenure-track faculty headcounts saw the largest spike at 7% year over year, the biggest increase for that group since at least 2016.  

Dive Insight:

Last year’s staff declines came amid bloodletting across a wide swath of institutions that have slashed budgets under enrollment and other pressures, including the Trump administration’s disruptions to federal research funding. 

The staff declines came after growth in the prior year. CUPA-HR described an “unprecedented expansion” of part-time staff in 2024, with their ranks growing 21.1%. 

However, in the years before that, part-time staff headcounts fluctuated quite a bit. Part-time headcounts declined in five out of the eight years before 2024. 

Full-time staff changes have been more consistently positive since 2016, with dips during 2020 and 2021. However, 2025’s declines significantly outpaced those seen during the pandemic era.

Other recent research sheds some light on how administrators approach employee cuts during tough times. 

A working paper earlier this year from Robert Kelchen, an educational leadership and policy professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, showed that during budget crunches, colleges often cut deepest at core operational costs such as facilities, finance and general administration. At the same time, leaders frequently protect research administration, human resources and student services, according to Kelchen’s research.  

As for the surge in tenured faculty hiring in 2025, that followed nearly a decade that saw declines in some years and middling growth in others — and a decades-long shift toward a more contingent academic workforce. 

Between 1987 and 2023, the share of faculty who held full-time tenured or tenure-track positions fell from 53% to 32%, according to a 2025 analysis by the American Association of University Professors. Meanwhile, contingent faculty jumped from 47% to 68% during that time.

“The ever-increasing reliance on faculty members holding contingent appointments and graduate student employees — all of whom have less job security, remuneration, and institutional support — weakens academic freedom, faculty governance, and the integrity of faculty work,” AAUP Senior Researcher Glenn Colby said of the findings at the time. 

CUPA-HR’s survey only covers changes in 2025. But as 2026 has brought continued layoffs of both staff and faculty as many institutions grapple with projected deficits for fiscal 2027, next year’s CUPA-HR survey could show further losses.