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Voluntary faculty and higher education staff turnover, excluding retirements, decreased in 2023–24 after two years of sharp rises, according to the latest survey data from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).
“Turnover rates have not quite declined to pre-pandemic levels, but they are trending in that direction,” the association wrote on its website this week. This “may indicate that retention efforts such as pay increases have helped mitigate the high turnover many institutions have experienced in the past few years,” it said.
According to a separate American Association of University Professors survey on faculty salaries, in fall 2023, the average salary rose for full-time faculty members after adjusting for inflation for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. But the raise was only about a half-percent. Similarly, CUPA-HR reported in March that this past year was the first since the pandemic began in which median pay increases for employees, including both faculty and staff members, beat inflation.
CUPA-HR’s new report shows faculty turnover rates have been far lower than for staff over the past seven years. Part-time, nonexempt staff have consistently had the highest rates among all the employee categories CUPA-HR uses.
From 2017–18 to 2020–21, the median voluntary turnover rate for part-time, nonexempt staff hovered around 15 percent among surveyed institutions (there were anywhere from 323 to 712, depending on the data point). That rate then climbed past 20 percent as of 2022–23, but has fallen again to 15 percent as of 2023–24. Comparatively, voluntary turnover rates for tenure-track faculty have remained below 5 percent across all seven years, even during the 2022–23 peak.
Voluntary turnover rates didn’t vary much from year to year before the pandemic, CUPA-HR said. Then, in 2020–21, “there were slight dips in voluntary turnover for each category of staff and faculty, likely due to the economic uncertainty that characterized that year.” Voluntary turnover then increased in the next two years, before the drop in 2023–24.
As for retirements, which aren’t included in CUPA-HR’s voluntary turnover rates, the association wrote that “tenure-track faculty have had the highest retirement rate of any other employee type in each year since CUPA-HR began collecting these data in 2017–18.”
