Authority Payroll

Higher Education Student Assistance Authority

248 employees · Independent public authority

Higher Education Student Assistance Authority is a substantial independent public authority, employing 248 people statewide.

The most common title is Stdnt Fincl Aid Adminr 2 (15% of staff), followed by Program Officer, Student Assistance and Investigator, Student Loans. Median pay is $82,173, about 10% above the statewide median. About 61% of its employees hold a title that matches a civil service specification.

Pension enrolment at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority

76 people at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority are enrolled in a State-administered pension fund, which is 31% of the 248 employees on its payroll. Independent authorities are not required to place staff in the State funds, so this is a measure of pension enrolment rather than of the workforce.

Because that covers only 31% of the payroll, no salary distribution is shown here. A median drawn from a small and self-selected slice of an authority is not a statistic about the authority, and publishing one would invite exactly the wrong comparison. Most staff at this authority participate in a plan outside the State system.

These figures are pensionable salary reported to the NJ Division of Pensions and Benefits for the four most recent quarters, not total pay and not take-home pay. Snapshot of March 31, 2026. How we compile this.

The Higher Education Student Assistance Authority is New Jersey's student financial aid agency. It runs the Tuition Aid Grant program, administers the NJCLASS student loan program and the NJBEST college savings plan, and processes the state aid application data that New Jersey colleges rely on. It is a program administration and lending operation rather than a physical one, so its workforce is entirely full time and office based.

Higher Education Student Assistance Authority recorded 248 employees on New Jersey's independent authority payroll as of December 31, 2025. That is 1.3% of the 19,416 people employed across the 16 authorities in this dataset, and the 6th largest headcount of the group. Every employee on the payroll is recorded as full time.

The staff is built around aid programs and the loan portfolio: program officers and program specialists in student assistance, student loan program managers, investigators working on loan accounts, research and planning staff, and the information technology group that keeps the application and loan systems running.

What Higher Education Student Assistance Authority pays

Half of the employees at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority earn more than $82,173 and half earn less. The middle half of the payroll falls between $69,075 and $106,451, and reported pay runs from $38,760 to $163,013. That median is 9.6% above the $75,005 median across the authority payroll as a whole. Overtime is rare on this payroll: 22 employees (8.9% of the workforce) recorded overtime, totaling $107,976, an average of $4,908 each among those who received any.

Median salary	$82,173
25th percentile	$69,075
75th percentile	$106,451
Lowest reported	$38,760
Highest reported	$163,013
Employees with salary data	248

All records on this payroll are full time, so the figures above need no adjustment for part time hours. Extreme outliers are trimmed before the percentiles are calculated.

Jobs that exist only at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority

97 of the 248 employees here work under titles the authority defines itself. Sorting those titles by the kind of work they cover says more about how the organization is staffed than the match rate does.

Job family	Employees	Share of workforce
Program and education staff	59	23.8%
Appointed and board positions	10	4%
Higher education programs	10	4%
Other authority titles	8	3.2%
Authority administration	7	2.8%
Administrative, program and professional staff	2	0.8%

These families are our own grouping of the 15 distinct authority titles the crosswalk records here, covering 96 of those employees. They are not an official classification, and the shares are given against total headcount at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority.

Largest authority-specific titles

STDNT FINCL AID ADMINR 2: 37 employees. Student financial aid administrator (HESAA)
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: 10 employees
ASSOCIATE MANAGER OFFICE OF STUDENT ASSISTANCE: 10 employees
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR BDGT & FSCL PLNNG: 7 employees
DIRECTOR,COMPUTER PLANNING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS,OSA: 7 employees. Director computer planning HESAA
DIRECTOR, PLANNING AND RESEARCH HIGHER EDUCATION COMMISSION: 5 employees. Director planning Higher Education Commission
SDNT FINCL AID ADMINR 1: 5 employees
ASSOCIATE MANAGER OFC STDNT ASSTC: 5 employees

Civil service titles and authority titles

151 of the 248 people on this payroll (60.9%) hold a job title whose name matches a New Jersey civil service specification. The other 97 work under titles that exist only inside the authority.

A high share like that is easy to misread, so it is worth being precise about what was measured: title text, and nothing else. A match is title text lining up with a published specification, not Title 11A status; the employer directory answers that question, and data sources explains the crosswalk.

HESAA has the highest civil service title match rate of any authority on this list. Its positions sit in a block of civil service specifications written specifically for the Office of Student Assistance, which is why so many of its employees line up with published specs while the transit and toll authorities do not. If you want to see what an authority looks like when its titles were drafted inside the civil service system, this is the one.

Civil service titles in use here

These are the titles at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority that match a published specification. Each links to the specification, where you can read the definition, the requirements, and the salary range the state assigns to it.

PROGRAM OFFICER, STUDENT ASSISTANCE: 24 employees
INVESTIGATOR, STUDENT LOANS: 20 employees
PROGRAM ASSOCIATE, STUDENT ASSISTANCE: 14 employees
PROGRAM SPECIALIST, RESEARCH AND PLANNING: 13 employees
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, STUDENT LOAN PROGRAM: 12 employees
PROGRAM SPECIALIST, STUDENT ASSISTANCE: 12 employees
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SPECIALIST: 10 employees
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, STUDENT LOAN PROGRAMS: 9 employees
SENIOR INVESTIGATOR, STUDENT LOANS: 6 employees
DEPUTY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: 3 employees
PRINCIPAL CLERK TYPIST: 3 employees
PERSONNEL ASSISTANT 4: 3 employees

Frequently asked questions

How many people work at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority?

248 employees appear on the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority payroll as of December 31, 2025, which is 1.3% of the 19,416 employees across New Jersey's independent public authorities.

What does Higher Education Student Assistance Authority pay?

The median salary is $82,173, with the middle half of the payroll between $69,075 and $106,451 and reported pay ranging from $38,760 to $163,013.

Are Higher Education Student Assistance Authority jobs civil service jobs?

60.9% of employees here hold a title that matches a New Jersey civil service specification by name. That compares title text, not Title 11A status: this authority recruits directly rather than through Commission exams and eligible lists.

What are the most common jobs at Higher Education Student Assistance Authority?

The largest authority-specific titles are STDNT FINCL AID ADMINR 2 (37 employees), EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (10 employees), ASSOCIATE MANAGER OFFICE OF STUDENT ASSISTANCE (10 employees), ASSISTANT DIRECTOR BDGT & FSCL PLNNG (7 employees). Our authority title crosswalk records 15 distinct titles here with no civil service counterpart, which is normal for an independent authority: it writes its own classifications rather than drawing on the state classification plan.

Why do so many Higher Education Student Assistance Authority titles match civil service specifications?

About this data

New Jersey YourMoney authority payroll, snapshot dated December 31, 2025. Higher Education Student Assistance Authority is not paid through the centralized state payroll, so these figures are never merged with state agency payroll on this site, and the dataset carries no hire date, so no tenure figures exist. Salary values mix annual and hourly records, and hourly rates are annualized before percentiles are calculated. Full method: data sources and methodology.

Compare with statewide workforce analytics, browse the other independent authorities, or look up a civil service job title.