The American professoriate is now primarily comprised of more non-tenure track faculty members than tenure track or tenured professors. This shifting nature and organization of academic work took place rapidly and without deliberate attention paid to the long-term implications of this change (Baldwin & Chronister, 2001; Finkelstein, Conley, & Schuster, 2016). Most often, this structural change to the academic profession is considered a foregone conclusion, a byproduct of larger, budgetary decisions within universities. However, these conclusions are incomplete in their exclusive focus on the financial motivations behind the increased reliance on contingent appointments. This study refines the reasons for this shift towards non-tenure track faculty appointments and away from tenure track and tenured positions by exploring faculty hiring decisions at one of the institutional types where this labor trend has been most prominent regional comprehensive universities. Building on research surrounding the changing academic profession and regional comprehensive universities, and using both document analysis and semi-structured interviews, this study uses a multisite case study design to uncover the factors that shape university administrators academic hiring decisions, especially those related to appointment type. By exploring faculty hiring decisions, this provides a typology of contributing factors in the changing academic labor systems at regional comprehensive universities and provides evidence about changes to the academic profession within this institutional sector of higher education, which is absent from the larger discourse. Additionally, this study begins theory development around the compounded mechanisms behind changes to the academic labor system. This development begins with this studys guiding conceptual framework that draws on organizational ecology in addition to resource dependence theory and the sociological concept of microfoundations. This framework facilitates greater understanding of academic workforce trends among institutions of higher education, addressing the external, institutional, and individual factors included in organizational change processes. This studys findings include implications for both research and practice, highlighting how changes to the academic profession are not byproducts of larger budgetary decisions; instead, faculty hiring decisions and changes to academic work constitute significant budgetary decisions in their own right and have significant implications for the future success of the academy.