Administrators represent the bureaucratic heads of any academic organization. In higher education, these leaders are often referred to as deans. For instance, a university may have a dean of its business school with other deans, such as sssociate or assistant deans, below her. As Margo Greicar writes on the Bowling Green State University website, deans in the U.S. have an average age of 54 years and an average tenure of 5.4 years; work long days; and typically are former faculty members.
Faculty represent the academic staff of an academic organization, including professors, researchers and lecturers. Many, though not all, faculty have doctoral degrees. Faculty can be tenure- or non-tenure-track; those with tenure typically have superior career security. As Judith M. Gappa reports on the Change Magazine website, while the majority of American faculty in 1975 were tenure-track, by 2007 most faculty held non-tenure-track positions. Gappa also notes that more women and people of color have become faculty members.
Staff within an academic organization offer support services outside those provided by faculty or administrators. For example, staff for a business school in a university can include teaching assistants, tutors for students, or career advisers. Wing Keung Jason Lau of the University of Iowa found that across American higher education, staff are predominantly female, nearly all have bachelor's or graduate degrees, and members are distributed fairly evenly across age brackets.
Students are perhaps the most visible constituents of any academic organization. The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators provides insight into the characteristics of today's American undergraduate student through its annual student survey. The vast majority of American college students study full-time, a majority are female, and a majority live off-campus. A small plurality of students are business majors, more than 25 percent have transferred colleges, and a majority attend at least some nonacademic campus activities.