Higher education administration programs prepare people to manage colleges and universities. Students learn how to develop policies. They learn how to finance programs, budget, and work with faculty. They also learn about providing services to students.

Try surfing around a college web site, counting the number of nonteaching job titles you see. You'll find titles such as dean, assistant dean, provost, academic advisor, registrar, bursar, controller, student affairs director, and admissions director, among others. From this you can see that it takes a lot of staff to run an institution of higher education. Some of these people started in a teaching position and were drawn into administrative work. (Academic advisors often follow this career path.) But many set their sights on this kind of work to begin with.

You can prepare for many of these positions by getting a graduate degree in higher education administration. Often a good strategy is to get a position as an aide in one of these offices after getting your bachelor's degree. The field of your bachelor's degree is usually not critical, although it may have some relevance. For example, if you want to work in the admissions office, a liberal arts major would help. For work in the registrar's office, knowledge of computer science would be a plus. The bachelor's degree normally takes four years of full-time study beyond high school.

Your next step is to get a master's degree in higher education administration. About 60 graduate schools offer this degree, and it is the usual minimal requirement for a professional job in this field. It takes the equivalent of one or two years of full-time study beyond the bachelor's.

In this program, you view the college both as an institution of learning and as a business. You learn how to plan academic offerings based on a combination of factors. You consider what the school's traditional mission has been, what will appeal to prospective students, what will serve the job market, and what faculty and facilities are available and appropriate regarding course offerings. You learn about nonacademic services that students expect, such as counseling, sports, and housing. You study methods of evaluating programs and staff. You learn how a college raises funds and how it budgets them. You study laws that apply to higher education, such as those that govern affirmative action and equal access.

For professional advancement you may get a doctoral degree in this field. About 80 graduate schools offer this degree, which usually takes the equivalent of three years beyond the master's. The emphasis of the doctoral program is on research. Since research produces data, you can expect to study ways to use statistics to analyze data. The culmination of your research is your dissertation.