This report explores the higher education financial aid workforce, including pay and pay equity, staffing, representation, and retention. Taken together, the results in this report suggest the need for colleges and universities to implement strategies to better retain people of color within the financial aid employee pipeline and to ensure…

The data presented in this report provide facts about the extent to which local, state, and national governments commit resources to public education. The level of commitment to education varies on a state-by-state basis. National Education Association (NEA) Research offers this report to its state and local affiliates as well as to researchers,…

Data showing what students earn after attending higher education institutions have become increasingly available, bolstering calls from policymakers and advocates that government financial aid programs should be tied to those outcomes. Often overlooked, however, is that these data and policies usually reflect the earnings of only students who…

The rise in numbers of non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) and the impact on student success is not a simple causal relationship. Rather, it is a complex formula of academic supports, strategic staffing, and professional socialization that drives student retention and, inevitably, graduation. At the center of the administration, policies, students,…

Purpose: The job satisfaction of university graduates can serve as an indicator of success in their professional development. At the same time, it can be a measure of higher education systems' effectiveness. The purpose is to assess the relationship of university graduates' socio-demographic characteristics, aspects of their degree program,…

Many Head Start programs have closed classrooms due to staff shortages, with up to 30% of teacher positions unfilled. Reducing the elevated teacher turnover rate in Head Start centers is critical to maintaining program effectiveness and controlling costs; however, a limiting factor may be differences in administrators' and teachers' perceptions of…

Theories of market-based school reform suggest that teacher labor markets may be inefficient because schools lack autonomy to incentivize performance in hiring, retention, and compensation. We test this empirically by comparing teacher exits in the deregulated market of New Orleans with neighboring traditional school districts. We find that the…

The objective of this study was to understand which factors contribute most to Psychology and Teaching graduates' satisfaction with their university professional formation. Two factors were assessed: the level of admissions selectivity by the university attended, and the salary received once employed. The participants graduated from three…

Many higher education institutions seek to attract and retain diverse faculty in an effort to intentionally diversify college campuses and make them more inclusive. The development of a diverse faculty body that matches the diversity of the student body is crucial, but the representation of foreign-born people with doctoral degrees who are working…

This paper studies the main determinants of salaries for economics students in their year-long industrial placements. Using three different sources of data on three cohorts of economics placement students, including demographic characteristics, academic performance, programme of studies and employability-related characteristics, we find that…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

Shifting realities across the world have emphasized the need to change early childhood systems thinking. Specifically, a quality early childhood workforce was in high demand before the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be in demand until sustainable recruitment and retention efforts are achieved. Encouraging more professionals to enter and…

This article draws on recent insight regarding the distribution and mobility of highly effective teachers, student access to top-performing educators, and research on the effectiveness of strategic compensation reforms to argue that the single-salary pay schedule has resulted in disturbing inequities for students and inefficiencies in resource…

Classroom stories show how using technology to investigate the wage gap provided opportunities to develop students' identities and agency and enabled a classroom culture of sharing and risk-taking. This article illustrates how technology can (a) support students' engagement in case-based reasoning by helping them organize and analyze data; (b)…

This action research study implemented an intervention, the Learn at Work program, for operational employees in facilities management at William & Mary earning less than $19 an hour. One of eight dimensions in the Workplace Inclusion Scale, developed by Lennox et al. (2022), is "access to opportunity" (p. 27). This study's…