National Center for Education Statistics

Those factors also appear to be fueling demand for management staff.

Total staffing at four-year colleges and universities nationwide was up 7% between fiscal year 2019 and 2025, while hiring of managers and administration staff was up 16%, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics.

In Western New York, more than half of the universities and colleges cut full-time staff over the last five years, and just under half excuse me, cut management jobs as well.

Now here's some examples.

Dr. Katie Johnson is Vice President of Higher Education Strategy at Qualtrics.

Prior to Qualtrics, she worked as a Research Director at Hanover Research and a Research Education Analyst at RTI International, focusing on post-secondary student surveys for the National Center for Education Statistics.

Value is a key metric in measuring higher ed outcomes.

And our two guests recently collaborated on a survey of students and what they perceive as value and what leads to value.

That improved quality of life makes for better teachers, but not everyone makes it to that level of stability.

In fact, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, about 44% of educators leave the profession in the first five years.

The struggle to afford housing is one of the reasons teachers leave.

If they've put in that time and they've improved and now they're like really honing their craft with students and they're helping them improve, If then they have to leave because of housing pressures, they take all of that experience with them and they go serve another community.

Because last year, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics got fired after a jobs report the president called rigged.

And the National Center for Education Statistics went from about 100 people down to four at one point.

That's what happens when the scoreboard works for the people being scored.

They fired the scorekeeper or they just stopped paying him.

They're reconstituting it, but they essentially laid off 95% of the staff there and they're having to rehire people.

That was the National Center for Education Statistics, right? Correct, yes, that's the official name.

Okay, yeah, I think I saw that in some of your writing.

Okay, so federal data, it's everywhere.

You shared with me this report from the American Statistical Association called the Nation's Data at Risk, I guess, published last year or early this year.

this year in which they document that most of the 13 major statistical agencies have lost around 20 to 30 percent of their staff over the last year.

And as you mentioned earlier, the National Center for Education Statistics lost something like 90 percent of its people.

So could you tell us, like, start there? Why is that happening? And then what else has happened over the last year that you that you would want to draw attention to and the threats, the risks to the industry?

The average American adult reads at a 7th to 8th grade level, which is similar to the reading skills of a 12 to 14-year-old.

Half of U.S. adults read at or below an 8th grade level, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Modeled estimates indicate that about 54% of U.S. adults, roughly 130 million people aged 16 to 74, read below a sixth grade level.

About 45 million U.S. adults are considered functionally illiterate, meaning that they read below a fifth grade level and struggle with everyday tasks like reading prescription labels or job applications.

On Wednesday, which is designated as Unity Day, dozens of landmarks across the U.S. and Canada will participate in the Bullying Bites campaign promoted by the American Association of Orthodontists in partnership with Stand for the Silent.

Surveys have found one in five students aged 12 to 18 report being bullied during school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

By wearing orange on Wednesday, people can send a visible message of kindness, acceptance, and support to local youth.

Orthodontists are in a unique position to support children and families because they routinely see school-aged patients every six to eight weeks throughout the course of treatment.

Tensio dictates, [laughs] dictates these things.

So I guess the backstory, I referenced some earlier work I'd done in Florida, and that was really how I got interested in this, but it was all using aggregated, uh, NCES data on, like, school composition.

So you could see the fraction of, uh, lower income kids that went to a school, but you really couldn't, you couldn't actually see children moving and changing addresses, and you didn't know anything about the renter versus owner composition.

Mm-hmm.