The Real Cost of a Vacant University Position (And Why Turnover Is Still Elevated)

Turnover data in higher education tells a more complicated story than “the Great Resignation is over.” According to CUPA-HR’s most recent workforce turnover analysis, voluntary turnover for tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, and full-time exempt staff has settled back to roughly pre-pandemic levels. But turnover for part-time staff and full-time non-exempt staff — the roles that keep departments, labs, and student services running day to day — remains above where it was before 2020, and in some institutional categories runs more than double the rate of exempt staff.

What the data actually shows

A few things stand out in the most recent reporting:

• Exempt and faculty turnover has normalized. Tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, and full-time exempt staff turnover has largely returned to pre-pandemic baselines.
• Non-exempt and part-time turnover hasn’t. These categories remain elevated, and in some cases are more than double the exempt/faculty rate — meaning the roles with the least hiring attention (admin assistants, coordinators, support staff) are also the ones churning fastest.
• Involuntary turnover spiked. The most recent reporting period (November 2023–November 2024) showed a notable spike in involuntary turnover across all employee categories, which compounds the hiring load on top of voluntary attrition.

Put together: even in a year where headline “resignation” turnover looks calm, most departments are still running a meaningful, ongoing backfill load — concentrated in exactly the staff roles that are easiest to deprioritize when a hiring team is stretched thin.

What an open position actually costs

The line-item cost of running a search — job board postings, staff time on screening, interview logistics — is the visible part. The larger cost is usually invisible on any budget line:

• Redistributed workload. When a role sits open, the work doesn’t stop — it gets absorbed by remaining staff, which is itself a well-documented driver of further attrition. An unfilled position can quietly create the conditions for the next one.
• Stalled faculty and research output. An open faculty line means a semester (or more) without that person’s teaching load covered, and for research-active positions, delayed grant activity, stalled lab operations, or a funded project sitting idle.
• Lost institutional knowledge. Especially in administrative and research-support roles, departing staff take process knowledge with them that isn’t always documented anywhere else.
• Service and enrollment impact. For student-facing and enrollment-adjacent roles, an extended vacancy can show up directly in service quality or response time — the kind of thing that’s hard to quantify but easy to feel.

None of these costs show up as a single number on an invoice, which is part of why “just post it and wait” can feel like the low-cost option even when it isn’t. The actual cost of a vacancy scales with how long it stays open — which makes time-to-fill one of the highest-leverage numbers a department can influence.

Shortening the gap

The fastest lever most departments have isn’t a bigger recruiting budget — it’s replacing passive posting with active outreach for the roles that are hardest to keep filled. That’s especially true for the non-exempt and part-time categories CUPA-HR flags as still running hot: these are rarely the positions that get a dedicated search committee or a retained search engagement, which means they’re often the ones sitting open longest by default, not by necessity.

If you’re carrying open staff or faculty positions right now and want a faster path to qualified candidates, schedule a free consultation — we’ll walk through what active sourcing could look like for your specific openings.

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Sources: CUPA-HR — Higher Ed Workforce Turnover, CUPA-HR — 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey, Inside Higher Ed — Faculty, staff voluntary turnover rates fall post-pandemic.