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Higher Education Is Now Feeling the Consequences of K–12 Workforce Shortages — and It’s Time to Lead the Solution
· Daniel E. Ross
For years, colleges and universities have faced criticism that they are not producing enough graduates prepared to meet workforce needs. That argument is more complicated in some fields than in others. In education and student support services, however, the workforce gap is increasingly difficult to ignore.
K–12 schools across the country continue to struggle to recruit and retain special educators, school psychologists, counselors, behavior analysts, therapists, and other professionals responsible for supporting students with increasingly complex needs. These shortages are usually discussed as a K–12 problem. They are not.
The students affected by those shortages eventually become college students.
Higher education is therefore beginning to experience the downstream consequences of a workforce problem that developed much earlier in the educational pipeline.
Unmet Needs Do Not Disappear at Graduation
When schools lack sufficient staffing in special education, behavioral health, counseling, and related services, students do not simply stop needing those supports. Evaluations may be delayed. Interventions may be inconsistent. Behavioral and emotional needs can become more difficult to address over time. Students may receive enough support to progress academically without having fully developed the skills necessary to manage increasing independence.
Those students eventually arrive on college campuses.
Some enter higher education with significant difficulty regulating emotions, navigating conflict, developing relationships, responding to feedback, or advocating effectively for themselves. Others continue to manage disabilities or mental-health needs that require substantial institutional support.
None of this suggests that today’s students are somehow deficient as a generation. It suggests that educational systems are interconnected.
A student who has spent years moving through an understaffed support system does not suddenly become fully independent when handed a residence hall key.
The Effects Are Visible Across College Campuses
Many of the challenges now confronting higher education have obvious connections to student support.
Counseling centers are under pressure. Disability services offices are managing increasingly complex caseloads. Residence-life professionals are responding to behavioral and interpersonal issues that may previously have been addressed through stronger school-based support systems. Faculty members are navigating classroom situations for which traditional academic preparation offered little guidance.
Institutions are simultaneously concerned about retention, persistence, student conduct, campus safety, mental health, and belonging.
These issues are often treated as separate institutional challenges. In reality, they frequently intersect.
Students who struggle with emotional regulation, relationships, conflict, or untreated disabilities may also struggle academically. They may withdraw socially, become involved in conduct processes, disengage from faculty, or leave college altogether.
Higher education consequently finds itself attempting to address problems at the end of an educational pipeline without sufficient attention to what is happening earlier in that pipeline.
Higher Education Has a Role in the Workforce Shortage
Colleges and universities cannot solve the national shortage of educators and student-support professionals by themselves. They do, however, have considerable influence over the size and strength of the workforce pipeline.
Universities determine the capacity of teacher preparation programs. They decide how many faculty lines support programs in special education, counseling, school psychology, speech-language pathology, occupational therapy, behavioral services, and related fields. They determine which programs receive institutional investment, recruitment support, scholarships, clinical partnerships, and visibility.
Over time, some high-need programs have struggled with limited enrollment capacity, insufficient faculty, expensive clinical requirements, and competition for institutional resources. At the same time, K–12 systems have faced persistent vacancies in precisely these areas.
The result is a structural mismatch between workforce demand and preparation capacity.
Higher education is now experiencing some of the consequences of that mismatch within its own institutions.
Hiring additional counselors, disability-services staff, or conduct personnel may be necessary, but it addresses only the immediate campus need. A longer-term solution requires strengthening the professional workforce that supports students well before they reach college.
Building a Stronger Pipeline
There are several areas in which higher education can take a more deliberate leadership role.
Recruit students intentionally
Universities should identify students whose interests and dispositions may make them strong candidates for high-need professions.
Psychology, human development, sociology, education, and related programs contain students who may never have considered careers in special education, school psychology, counseling, behavioral health, or therapy. Resident assistants, peer mentors, first-generation college students, community college transfers, and students with relevant lived experience may also bring important strengths to these professions.
Recruitment should be active rather than passive.
Reduce the financial barriers to entering high-need professions
Many of these careers require advanced degrees, extensive clinical preparation, or unpaid field experiences. That creates a significant barrier for students who cannot afford to spend years preparing for a profession without adequate financial support.
Universities and their partners can respond through paid practicums, accelerated bachelor’s-to-master’s pathways, tuition assistance, graduate assistantships, living stipends, loan-forgiveness programs, and employment partnerships.
If society considers these professions essential, the pathway into them should not be financially prohibitive.
Teach professional dispositions explicitly
Technical knowledge alone is insufficient for work involving students with complex emotional, behavioral, or developmental needs.
Professionals in these fields need resilience, emotional regulation, cultural responsiveness, reflective practice, collaboration skills, and the ability to manage conflict constructively.
Programs sometimes treat those qualities as something students should already possess. They should instead be developed intentionally, assessed appropriately, and reinforced throughout professional preparation.
Strengthen field experiences
Students are more likely to understand and remain committed to a profession when they have meaningful opportunities to experience the work.
Strong university-school partnerships can provide progressively deeper experiences: observation early in a program, regular participation in schools, supervised practice, clinical placements, and structured feedback.
Field experiences should help students develop competence gradually rather than discovering the realities of the profession during their final semester.
Use institutional influence beyond the university
Preparing more graduates will accomplish little if working conditions cause them to leave the profession.
Higher education has considerable influence in public policy. Universities have research centers, government-relations operations, alumni networks, boards, donors, and established relationships with policymakers.
That influence can be used to support competitive compensation, sustainable workloads, effective mentoring, and improved working conditions in high-need professions.
There is little value in expanding a professional pipeline if the system at the other end cannot retain the people entering it.
This Is Also a Higher Education Strategy
Strengthening the K–12 workforce should not be viewed simply as an act of service to public schools.
It is in higher education’s own interest.
Colleges want stronger retention, safer campuses, healthier residence halls, more successful students, stable enrollment, improved graduation rates, and graduates capable of moving successfully into adulthood and employment.
Those outcomes become more difficult when students arrive after years of inconsistent access to the professionals who could have supported their development earlier.
The educational pipeline does not begin when a student enrolls in college, and higher education’s interest in student success should not begin there either.
The Bottom Line
The K–12 workforce shortage is increasingly becoming a higher education student-success issue.
Colleges and universities have both an opportunity and a responsibility to help strengthen the pipeline of special educators, counselors, psychologists, therapists, behavior specialists, and other professionals upon whom schools depend.
That means recruiting students intentionally, reducing financial barriers, strengthening professional preparation, expanding meaningful field experiences, partnering more closely with schools, and using institutional influence to improve the conditions graduates encounter when they enter the workforce.
Higher education cannot solve the problem alone. But few institutions are better positioned to convene the people, prepare the professionals, conduct the research, influence policy, and build the partnerships necessary to make progress.
If colleges want students to arrive prepared to succeed, they have a direct interest in strengthening the systems that support those students long before they reach campus.
By Daniel E. Ross
Education and operations leader, former superintendent, and author focused on organizational alignment, workforce systems, and practical institutional improvement.
An earlier version of this essay was published on LinkedIn on November 16, 2025. View the original LinkedIn article.
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