Faculty Aren’t Leaving Higher Ed—They’re Leaving You

(A Hard Look at What Institutions Can Fix Right Now)

By Dani Babb, PhD | Founder, FacultyJobTools and Babb Education

For more than 25 years, I've helped faculty find online teaching roles — long before "remote work" was a buzzword and well before institutions realized how much adjunct labor keeps their classrooms running. Through Faculty Job Tools, I've witnessed something that has grown impossible to ignore:

Faculty are leaving their institutions — or preparing to — and they're telling me exactly why.

Many university leaders tell me that they don't have a retention problem. For some, that's true. They've mastered what I'm writing about in this article. For others, it's only because your faculty haven't found a better paying, better work life balance job yet, plan to retire soon anyway or the job market is rough. But we should all want to do better for our employees.

This article is intentionally raw. It's based on more conversations than I can count, career reviews, application sessions, and real-world feedback collected over the past two years. It's going to upset many of you. And yes, it's current. What faculty are saying is consistent, credible, and often heartbreaking.

And the truth is simple:

Most of these issues can be fixed — if institutions are willing to listen.

Below are the top reasons faculty report actively seeking new roles, along with concrete, research-informed steps institutions can take if they want to keep their best educators.

1. Synchronous Overload Is Destroying Work–Life Balance

This is the #1 complaint I hear now — by a mile.

Institutions keep increasing synchronous expectations in online programs, and adjuncts are drowning in nighttime sessions that 80% of students never attend or wouldn't if it wasn't mandatory. Faculty tell me repeatedly:

"I signed up to teach online — not host live webinars five nights a week."

What institutions can do:

• Hold synchronous sessions during faculty work hours, not evenings.
• Make sessions optional and rely on recordings — students watch them.
• Shorten them to 30–60 minutes max.
• Reduce frequency to two or three touchpoints per term — not weekly events.

Schools implementing this through my team at Babb Education consistently see no decline in retention, because synchronous meetings were never the retention lever institutions assumed — they were a marketing tool.

If you want to stop faculty attrition, start here. Yes, your students are telling you that they want the sessions - But if you took them away, would your retention change? Try it and see. Many university leaders have told me over the last 10 years that this is more about marketing and less about actual touch points with learners.

2. Textbook & Lab Integration Chaos Is Burning Out Adjuncts

Let's call it what it is: integration drama.

Every term, adjuncts lose hours troubleshooting:

• Pearson
• McGraw-Hill Connect
• MyLab / Mastering
• Cengage / WebAssign
• WileyPlus
• SIMnet
• MindTap
• Labster
• uCertify

…and on it goes.

They aren't being paid for this — and adjuncts feel the pain the most.

Faculty spend the first weeks fixing logins instead of teaching. Students get frustrated. Integrations fail. Representatives change every term. Faculty get poor reviews for the poorly designed systems or instructional designers that didn't help integrate the lab for the faculty. And academic engagement drops because much of the course has been offloaded to a publisher.

There is one exception:

Lab simulations that teach truly hands-on skills (coding, healthcare, cybersecurity) can be effective when used intentionally.

Everywhere else without hands-on experience needed?

Faculty see these integrations as time-sinks that benefit institutions — not instructors or learners.

3. Inconsistent Workloads & "Who Even Is My Boss?" Syndrome

Another major reason faculty are leaving:

no reliability, no predictability, and no one to talk to.

Adjuncts tell me weekly:

"I haven't heard from my chair in months."

"I don't even know who replaced my supervisor."

"I'm fully qualified to teach three courses — but I'm only assigned one. Every other semester."

"I applied for a job at my own institution because they didn't realize I already work here." (Yep! Heard it again just this week)

And yes — institutions often post jobs for courses their own adjuncts can already teach.

If you want to improve faculty morale, fix this.

Institutions should:

• Communicate teaching assignments early.
• Maintain clear, accurate faculty rosters.
• Audit internal talent before external hiring.
• Offer consistent course loads to high-performing adjuncts.

It's embarrassing how often institutions lose great adjuncts simply because their name "fell off a spreadsheet." Faculty wonder why they were ghosted. MANY say they want to leave their profession entirely because of this. Others tell me that they are truly traumatized and question their worth.

Sometimes this happens after being at an institution for 10 or more years. Can we imagine any other profession where this would occur?

4. Administrative Burden Is Crippling Teaching Time

This is a rising frustration:

Adjuncts are being handed responsibilities far outside teaching.

Faculty are now expected to:

• Track and chase attendance
• Conduct all early-alert outreach
• Replace advising functions
• Manage communication workflows
• Troubleshoot the LMS
• Provide tech support for students
• Navigate outdated policy pages

Why?

Because institutions are reducing support roles — and shifting work to faculty.

Faculty want to teach.

They do not want to become the help desk or instructional design team. You need them to teach!

If you want to stop losing instructors, look closely at what you're requiring them to do outside the classroom.

5. Pay Is Stagnant — and Faculty Notice

Faculty are painfully aware that:

• Their pay has not increased in years
• Cost of living has skyrocketed
• Workload has grown
• Expectations have doubled
• Professional development is unpaid
• Training is unpaid and constantly growing
• Attending meetings is mandatory, frequent and uncompensated

If institutions value faculty, they must — at minimum — offer:

• Annual cost-of-living adjustments
• Fair pay for additional responsibilities
• Compensation for mandatory PD and meetings

Faculty are the lifeblood of the institution.

If compensation lags far behind expectations, they leave.

And they often leave quietly.

6. Poor Course Design Is Driving Faculty Away Fast

My work through Babb Education has made this point impossible to ignore:

Bad course design is one of the top reasons faculty resign.

Faculty spend hours each term fixing:

• Broken links
• Misaligned objectives
• Conflicting due dates
• Confusing assignment instructions
• Unclear navigation
• LMS clutter
• Outdated content

Some faculty stop enforcing deadlines because they feel guilty holding students accountable to a poorly designed shell. And no, they're not always telling you that.

Institutions can fix this immediately:

• Use one universal due date: Example: Sundays at 11:59 PM ET for assignments, Tuesdays at 11:59 PM ET for discussions.
• Remove dates from the LMS (put them in the syllabus only). Keep days in the LMS
• Clean up navigation
• Align outcomes with assessments
• Have the ID team test every link before term start
• Eliminate duplicate instructions across pages

Clean design helps students —

but it liberates faculty.

7. "Meeting Fatigue" Has Hit a Breaking Point

Faculty are overwhelmed with endless:

• Zoom meetings
• Teams meetings
• WebEx meetings
• Big Blue Button meetings
• Mandatory check-ins
• Virtual coffee chats

Faculty repeatedly tell me:

"I'm not burned out from teaching. I'm burned out from meetings about teaching."

If it can be an email, let it be an email.

Adjuncts especially resent unpaid mandatory meetings — and many tell me they explicitly avoid applying to schools known for heavy meeting culture.

The Big Picture (And a Warning)

These issues aren't small.

They aren't occasional.

They aren't exaggerated.

They are daily realities for faculty across online higher education, and students feel that their professors are checked out. They aren't checked out, they're just overwhelmed by non-academic things.

And if institutions continue adopting practices that:

• increase burnout
• decrease flexibility
• reduce autonomy
• maintain stagnant pay
• overload faculty with admin work
• maintain poorly designed shells

…then yes — they will lose great instructors.

My colleague and I have been presenting this data all year through peer reviewed work and we will continue next year. Institutions who ignore it will see the consequences sooner than they think.

Final Thought (And Hope)

The good news?

Every issue above can be fixed — often with minimal cost.

Faculty aren't asking for the world.

They want to teach.

They want stability.

They want clarity.

They want fair compensation.

And they want to work for institutions that respect both their time and their expertise.

At Faculty Job Tools, we help faculty find institutions that value them.

At Babb Education, we help universities design courses and systems that stop burning faculty out.

If your institution is adopting practices that contribute to the burnout above — it may be time to reconsider.

Because the institutions that fix these problems first will keep the strongest faculty.

And those that don't… won't.

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