Education Jobs Update, September 2025
Schools continue to hire, layoffs remain low, and turnover rates keep coming down
As we head into pumpkin spice season, I wanted to check back in on the education labor market.
The short summary is that things continue to look pretty stable. You could squint and see some trouble brewing for public higher education, but job openings and hirings remain strong, layoffs are low, and turnover rates are coming down from their pandemic-era highs.
The graph below shows the percentage since February 2020. Public K-12 and public higher ed have followed fairly similar trajectories, with both down nearly 10% at one point before a steady return above pre-pandemic employment levels. As of August this year, there were 8.2 million people working in public K-12 and 2.6 million people working for public colleges and universities.
Private child care services have gone through a much rockier transition period. The sector declined by 36% from February to April of 2020, and then it’s been on a faster growth trajectory since then. As of August 2025, it had 1.1 million employees, 66,000 (6.3%) more employees than it did pre-pandemic.
If you narrow in on the far right side of the graph, public K-12 schools added 9,000 employees in August. Over the course of 2025 so far, they’ve added 56,000 workers. That represents a modest gain of 0.7%.
Private childcare providers also keep chugging along. They added 4,000 employees in August and are up 18,000 on the year (a gain of 1.7%).
The situation looks a bit different in public higher ed. As a sector, it lost 3,000 jobs in August and is now down 21,000 jobs for the year to date (a decline of 0.8%).
I’ll keep watching these numbers throughout the fall and into the winter. I suspect we’ll continue to see a slowdown in the public-sector numbers, but for now everything looks fairly stable.