Colleges and universities closed out 2020 with continued job losses, resulting in a 13-percent drop since last February. Put another way, for every eight workers employed in academe in February 2020, at least one had lost or left that job 10 months later.
Though estimates of the number of workers employed by colleges and universities are available from the Labor Department, information on other classes of workers remain unavailable, such as how many employees lost their jobs because of scaled-back business at companies that contract with academic institutions to prepare food and clean facilities.
A Washington Post report and analysis last fall found that “the lowest-paid workers in higher education are bearing the brunt of the layoffs, mirroring broader trends of the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history.”
