Image: Karley Riffe (IHE PhD 2018) and Sondra Barringer (former postdoc) found significant and persistent differences in staff salaries across institutions of higher education, over time, and across occupational families. Their research, recently published in the Review of Higher Education, focused on salaries, organizational structures and labor markets for non-instructional and non-administrator staff in four-year non-profit schools across the United States. Riffe and Barringer’s article, “The Intersection of Institutional and Worker Hierarchies,” provides a more nuanced understanding of factors that influence salaries and calls for greater attention of working conditions provided to these workers. They seek to fill a gap in the literature around campus work-life, and the paper "highlights the diversity within this group by providing evidence of the institutional differences in salaries both across and within occupations.” The study also notes that some occupations are more influenced by environmental conditions over time, while others are not. They hope the work will be useful to administrators and inform their approach to human resource policies and practices. They write, “[I]institutional decision-makers must account for both institutional and occupational differences as well as labor market conditions when trying to understand variation in staff salaries both between occupations as well as within occupations across institutions.” Full article available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/796156 Type of News/Audience: Alumni
