Higher Education January 2026
~1.6m
Questions answered
over 12 months- /
~55
Organizations
These insights represent ~1.6m questions answered from ~55 organizations, collected between January 2025 and December 2025.
The data meet our criteria as being robust and reliable; unlikely to substantially change over time; and representative of the wider industry. Read more about the methodology.
Data provided by Culture Amp
Most represented industries in this benchmark
Higher Education
Most represented regions in this benchmark
Oceania
58%
Europe
28%
Northern America
10%
Asia
3%
Reported gender breakdown
Female
60%
Male
39%
Non-Binary
0.42%
Are employees committed to their organizations?
Engaged people are emotionally committed to their organization. These people stay at their organizations longer and are more productive and effective. Successful organizations have more engaged employees.
64% of Higher Education employees are engaged
This is in the bottom 27% compared with other industries.
The median eNPS score for organizations in this benchmark is 1 and is in the bottom 3% compared with other industries.
How does Higher Education compare?
On the lower side, people in Higher Education had much lower favorable scores than average in Action, Feedback & Recognition, and Service & Quality Focus.
People working in Higher Education are less engaged than Education Management, Education, Utilities, and Internet.
The highest scoring question for Higher Education had 89% of people agreeing that they know how their work contributes to the goals of %[Company]% (-1% compared to overall) while they were generally most positive about Management.
People in Higher Education were generally least favourable about Action, and were most negative towards 'When it is clear that someone is not delivering in their role we do something about it' with 24% of people disagreeing (+7% above average).
Which questions matter the most?
Different things are important to different cultures. If you want to make more of your people engaged then you need to know what is important your people. These questions are most important to keeping people engaged in Higher Education organizations.
1 %[Company]% is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development | Learning & Development |
2 I have access to the things I need to do my job well | Enablement (outcome) |
3 %[Company]% effectively directs resources (funding, people and effort) towards company goals | Company Performance |
How long do people stay?
In the short term, 28% of people in this benchmark are thinking of or actually seeking jobs elsewhere (+8% compared to overall) while on a longer time frame, 11% of people see themselves leaving within two years (+1% compared to overall).
Understanding Tenure distributions
Tenure describes how long an employee has worked for their company: we know through our research that newly hired employees tend to be more positive than their tenured counterparts. Positivity declines sharply before bottoming out between two to six years, then rises slightly for those that remain.
The tenure composition of a benchmark can influence overall scores.
Tenure distributions
Less than 3 months
2%
3 months to 6 months
3%
6 months to less than 1 year
5%
1 to less than 2 years
12%
2 to less than 4 years
21%
4 to less than 6 years
10%
6 to less than 10 years
18%
Greater than 10 years
29%