HigherEdJobs Scraper

Scrape HigherEdJobs.com — one of the largest US job boards dedicated to careers in higher education. Search live faculty, administrative, and executive job postings by keyword, category, region/state, position type, and institution type, or fetch full job details (description, salary, application deadline) by job ID. No login, no API key required; a free datacenter proxy is used by default as an anti-bot fallback.

What this actor does

• Two modes: search (browse/filter job listings) and byJobId (full detail lookup for specific jobs)
• 237 job categories across Admin, Executive, and Faculty tracks — from "Admin - Human Resources" to "Faculty - Technical and Career - Welding"
• Geographic filters — 13 broad regions (US regions, Canada, international) plus 75 individual states/provinces
• Position type — Full-Time / Adjunct-Part-Time
• Institution type — Four-Year, Two-Year/Community College, Outside Higher Education
• Location type — Location-bound vs. Online/Remote
• 6 sort orders — priority, date posted, institution, location, job title, category
• Empty fields are always omitted from output

Output per job

Search mode

• jobId, title, sourceUrl
• institutionName
• location, city, state
• category
• salaryText (when the employer discloses a range)
• postedText (e.g. "Posted 5 days ago")
• isPriority, isMilitaryFriendly — employer-purchased listing badges
• recordType: "job", scrapedAt

Detail mode (byJobId) — everything above, plus

• description — full job description, HTML stripped to plain text
• datePosted, validThrough
• institutionUrl
• country
• positionType — e.g. Full-Time, Part-Time
• categoryId
• applicationDue — a date, or "Open Until Filled"
• industries[]

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	search / byJobId
keyword	string	–	Free-text search (title + institution + location); leave blank to browse by filters only
onlyTitle	bool	false	Restrict keyword search to job titles only
jobCategories	array (select)	–	One or more of 237 job categories
region	select	–	Broad geographic region
subRegions	array (select)	–	Specific states/provinces
positionTypes	array (select)	–	Full-Time / Adjunct-Part-Time (empty = both)
institutionTypes	array (select)	–	Four-Year / Two-Year / Outside Higher Ed (empty = all)
remoteTypes	array (select)	–	Location Bound / Online-Remote (empty = both)
sortBy	select	Date Posted	Sort order for results
priorityOnly	bool	false	Only emit priority-upgrade listings
jobIds	array	–	Job codes for mode=byJobId, e.g. 179509399
maxItems	int	50	Hard cap on emitted records (1–2000)

Note: search mode needs at least one filter set — a keyword, category, region, or similar. HigherEdJobs' own search endpoint returns zero listings for a completely blank query (no keyword and no filters), so leave keyword set or add another filter to browse broadly.

Example: search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "keyword": "professor",
  "jobCategories": ["122"],
  "region": "3",
  "positionTypes": ["1"],
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: lookup by job ID

{
  "mode": "byJobId",
  "jobIds": ["179509399", "179514018"]
}

Use cases

• Higher-ed recruiting intelligence — track new faculty/admin openings by category or region
• Career sites / aggregators — mirror live academic job listings
• Labor-market research — analyze hiring trends by institution type or discipline
• Job alerts — poll a keyword/category combination on a schedule
• Salary benchmarking — collect disclosed salary ranges by category and region

FAQ

Do I need an account or cookies? No. All search and detail pages used by this actor are publicly accessible without login.

Why are some jobs missing salaryText? Many employers don't disclose a salary range; the field is only included when present.

What's the difference between region and subRegions? region is a broad multi-state area (e.g. "US - Southeast"); subRegions lets you pick individual states/provinces. Combine them for a state within a specific region, or use subRegions alone for state-only filtering.

What does isPriority mean? HigherEdJobs lets employers pay to feature a listing; isPriority mirrors that on-site badge. It does not affect data completeness.

How current is the data? Real-time — every request hits the live HigherEdJobs search/detail pages, the same ones a job seeker sees in their browser.

Can applicationDue be a date instead of "Open Until Filled"? Yes — many listings have a hard deadline; when present it's returned as-is from the listing.

Why did my run return 0 results even though the filters look fine? HigherEdJobs sits behind Incapsula/Imperva bot protection, which occasionally rate-limits or challenges all of Apify's shared cloud IP ranges (both the free AUTO datacenter proxy group and direct platform egress) at once, not just this actor's traffic — and the search endpoint in particular can stay in an enforcement window for extended periods. The actor already retries up to 6 times with a fresh session (new proxy IP + rotated browser TLS/JA fingerprint) per attempt and backs off aggressively (capped exponential backoff, up to ~25s between attempts) between tries, which recovers most of the time — but during a heavy Incapsula enforcement window every attempt can still fail. If this happens, the actor's status message explicitly says the search endpoint was blocked (as opposed to the generic "try widening filters" message you'd see for a genuinely empty result set), so the failure is never silent or mistaken for a filter problem. Wait a while and re-run search, or switch to mode=byJobId if you already have job IDs — the detail-page endpoint it hits is far less aggressively guarded and has proven far more reliable.